Simon Reeve is an author and TV presenter whose latest BBC show is The Mediterranean with Simon Reeve. His new book is Step by Step: The Life in My Journeys

My route into media was from the bottom. I’d gotten very low in my teens. I had a realisation after I left school that I had no idea what I was going to do, and I was all on my own. I’ve never felt as lost on any of my journeys as I did at home in Acton when I left school, realising that there was no key anyone was giving me that I could unlock my future with. It was a very dark place.

I woke up one morning and decided I needed to go on a journey. I decided to go to Scotland, set off on the train, and made my way to Glencoe. It might not sound like much to me now, but as a kid who’d never left London on their own it was a hell of a thing. I made it there late in the afternoon, and started pottering around in this place that I’d heard of as a place of myth and legend. It’s a rough old climb up there, but it wasn’t impossible, a breezy tough walk. But it was getting late in the day, and I had no supplies, no proper clothing, no food or water, and this was long before mobile phones. I started meeting people coming the other way who were raising eyebrows at me, because I was going the wrong way at the wrong time. I had nothing on me, just my trainers and a jacket, I was so clearly one of these muppets who eventually get lifted off by mountain rescue. In many ways it all should have gone horribly wrong, but I kept going. I was scrambling up the ridge in near darkness, except for the stars out above me so bright. It was such a glorious moment, I remember sitting there on the stony ridge just taking it all in. I felt such a rush, a sense of satisfaction. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite the thrill of discovery and achievement from anything I’ve done as I did at that moment alone on the ridge in Glencoe. I scrambled back down in the dark. I survived and it changed my life.

Eventually, after trying and failing to get lots of other jobs, I got a job as a postboy on The Sunday Times. I took that chance when it came; I started working at the paper and volunteering, going on little missions, and eventually became an investigator and writer on the paper. That was pretty much the making of me.

I had the dubious distinction of having written the first book in the world on Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, a book that came out in 1998. It started out as an investigation into the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, and when it came out, hardly anyone read it. It sat at the back of bookshops on the dusty shelves. Then 9/11 happened. Suddenly I was thrust onto TV to talk about perhaps the biggest story ever. I went from talking about events on TV, to being asked about appearing on TV.

I started out with a BBC series through Central Asia, in the early 2000s, which was a budget TV series shown in the graveyard shift after Newsnight. It went down pretty well, and they’ve let me carry on making series ever since. The budget meant that we didn’t have the money to make it ludicrously glossy, it was a self-shooting producer-director making them, and not enough time to rehearse and finesse things. You just have to make it up as you go along. But I loved it, it was so much more interesting than some TV projects where people have recces and scripts and rehearsals and multiple takes on different situations. That’s not a hugely interesting way of making TV for me. So I was really lucky that from the start I was brought into a project where the style appealed to me.

I think Equator, Tropic of Capricorn, and Tropic of Cancer were successes because the very idea of following a somewhat random imaginary line automatically forced me to go to parts of the world that people very rarely visit. Those particular trips were exploring the tropics, the most beautiful and benighted region of the world. Obviously the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer mark a boundary that we’ve identified, but they are also a geographical zone of the planet, with a specific climate and geography, and problems that result as well. It took us to places that people didn’t often see on the box, and there’s a joy in that.

Those projects were the key ones for me, because they took me from doing late-night programmes to something a bit glossier. Sometimes the BBC has asked me to make a series around Ireland or Australia, which clearly aren’t in forgotten corners of the planet. But filming around the Caribbean or across Russia – we’ve definitely gone to places that aren’t often seen on the TV.

I’ve just filmed a series travelling around the Mediterranean and we tried to find situations that are more surprising, perhaps a bit counter-intuitive. We ended up in Benidorm, as you do. While for many travellers Benidorm would be their absolute nightmare, there are experts on sustainability who suggest that actually Benidorm is one of the better models for mass tourism because it’s cramming people into smaller areas so their overall footprint can be reduced. They’re very hot on collecting rubbish, recycling and making sure that plastic doesn’t go into the sea. That was a lovely, different take on a place that we just associate with boozy, bashed-up Brits.

There’s always an artificiality to making TV programmes. There’s always a little bit of manipulation and creation in everything. We try to be as authentic as we can, but I worry a lot about the messages and the images that we’re receiving from even some of the best wildlife shows that are out there, because they do wallow in the imagery of the wonderful natural world. I’m not convinced they’re giving enough context to the problems that are out there, they haven’t been adequately identifying just what is happening with more than seven billion people on this planet. I think it is a failure and a shame. We can’t, as programme-makers, avoid telling the truth to people and showing them what’s going on, because otherwise we’re not just part of the problem, we’re helping to create it in the first place. We risk feeding an image of the planet as a place still teaming with wilderness and beautiful life and that, tragically, is changing very rapidly. It’s a duty, a responsibility, to try to convey that.

There are certainly too many stale, pale, male blokes doing travel shows – doing everything, in fact. There needs to be a real attempt, an insistence, on having more diversity in TV programmes, behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera. I think it is quite important to remember that it’s not just about gender and ethnicity. It’s about that whole issue of class as well. We’re still not creating a fully representative country if we have yet another ‘posho’ who’s a different colour or gender representing the people actually in the situation. We’ve got to open opportunities to all.

Since I’ve realised people were quite interested in the fact that my background isn’t Oxford, it isn’t public school, it isn’t education at all really, I’ve started being more open about that because I just think people need to realise that it is possible to make a little something of your life, even if you happen to come from somewhat pathetic backgrounds. So I think we’ve got to encourage others, and there have got to be schemes to push and prod people into interesting positions who don’t come from a conventional background of privilege.

I can watch my shows professionally when I’m scripting them and doing the voiceover, but I don’t sit down and watch them for anything resembling pleasure. I don’t think any presenter should be doing that, that would surely be outrageous narcissism. I still find myself far too irritating for that – my voice I find particularly irritating. But I’ve put up with it to try and get my lad to watch some of them, just so he can see where on Earth his dad disappears to. Sometimes he’ll watch bits of them, and then he’ll just start laughing at my dopiness and we’ll switch over. But I certainly don’t watch myself.

Fearghal O’Nuallain is a geography teacher and explorer. His edited book, The Kindness of Strangers, is on sale now, with all proceeds going to Oxfam's work with refugees

I’m a geography teacher that goes places. I’m trying to bring the field into the classroom, and to engage a wider audience with geographical issues through adventurous story telling.

What appeals to me most about geography is the fact that it embraces messiness. And the world is messy, that was one of the things that was really impressed upon me when I cycled round the world. When you move slowly over long distances, what stands out is how gradually things change, and how connected things are. When you’re talking about cultures, and even the physical characteristics of the world, everything merges into each other much more gradually than when you sit at home, looking at something through a screen. That’s what’s great about geography, we’re forced to go outside and engage with the world, and are reminded that the world is messy, and not nice and clean and easily packaged.

Cycling round the world left me with a sense that geographical understanding and environmental awareness is very important, and teaching offers a really nice way of giving that back. So that’s where the impetus of getting into the classroom came from. That’s not without frustration, because obviously just as the best way to teach music is by giving students an instrument, the best way to do geography is not to sit in a classroom and prepare for GCSEs and A-levels.

It’s very difficult to get students out into the field nowadays. I’m guessing most geography teachers who are passionate and engaged are also quite frustrated, because we would love to be outside a lot more.

The Water Diaries was borne out of a sense of wanting to find a vehicle for bringing the excitement and the adventure of the field into the classroom. To me it’s really exciting if you can mesh the curriculum with adventure, and find ways of using adventurous storytelling to animate and engage with actual stuff kids need to learn. When camera crews and journalists go out into the field, they could have a chat with an educator beforehand, so that they can later share some of their assets to be curated into something that is useful for a teacher in a classroom. The next best thing, or even the better thing, is an actual teacher going out into the field and collecting their own assets. You know what you’re looking for and you know what you want.

The Kindness of Strangerscame, like everything, from a journey. I visited the ‘jungle’ in Calais in 2015, and Daniel Martin, my co-founder, also happened to visit within a few days. We were both struck by the fact that here was a slum, which we’d seen in other parts of the world, essentially on our doorstep. When you move in RGS-IBG circles, you’re constantly engaging with people who’ve done impressive, daring, dangerous journeys, and who are celebrated for that. Here I was talking to people who had done these most amazing, dangerous journeys, but because they had no other choice. I met people who’d rowed across stretches of water risking their lives, who’d walked really long distances, who’d done all these physical feats. I was struck by the parallels between the human spirit, in terms of adventure, and also the exact same spirit in people who were undertaking difficult journeys out of necessity.

I was looking for a way to meld those two stories together, so we set up The Kindness of Strangers as a simple platform for storytelling. The basic idea was to get people who’ve done heroic things to tell stories about their vulnerabilities and times when other people had helped them, and to get people to see the humanity in people from other places. So far we’ve had Ed Stafford, Al Humphreys, Leon McCarron, Sarah Outen, and many others, while Levison Wood wrote the book’s introduction.

It’s quite interesting that everyone seems to come back with the same story of people who are really welcoming and friendly, and how we’re all so similar to each other. I know this sounds really basic, but it’s important than we keep banging that gong about basic human values and similarities, because there is a worry that things are turning in a different direction away from that really important message.

This was published in the October 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

Get the best of Geographical delivered straight to your inbox by signing up to our weekly newsletter and get a free collection of eBooks!

With fellow student Tom Micklethwait, Charles is travelling the route of the New Silk Road to explore the impact the initiative is having across the region

I study history, but specific interests are the historic Silk Road, the relationship between geography and history and questions related to global leadership. My interest in China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a manifestation of this interest. The Belt and Road Initiative represents China’s foreign policy centrepiece and both an economic and geo-political attempt to return to a position of predominance as a regional and, eventually, global agenda setter.

The New Silk Road Project is interested in understanding this. We will document the ongoing infrastructure integration via the people, places and companies forging this network, gauge perceptions of China’s growing global presence and interview the key thinkers and actors at the individual project level to see how the separate components differ from its overarching theory.

I think it is easy to forget that Europe sits on the edge of a much larger Eurasian landmass. Danny Quah’s map on the shifting economic centre of gravity shows that the rise of the East is a return to the historic norm. However, in the 21st century this shift of the economic centre of gravity eastwards is taking place at an unprecedented rate. For the first time since the end of the French Revolution, we are entering an age where Enlightenment thinking and Western cultures, languages, ideas and religions will not alone stand on the vanguard of global developments.

China has immense resources and a population it is able to mobilise in a way that other countries cannot. From what I understand, this is in part down to the conformity which Eastern religions such as Taoism and Confucianism imposes. Therefore, China’s leadership can act with a sense of purpose and long-sighted direction which other nations may not be able to. The new Silk Road displays China’s ambition to return to its position as zhongguo (middle kingdom) as Xi Jinping stated during China’s 19th National Party Congress.

At the start of June we are setting off from the Chinese Embassy in London and we will finish in early August in the wholesale market of Yiwu in Eastern China. Our route parallels that of the first direct London-Yiwu train that made its first journey in April 2017. Of course we do not want to follow the train exactly, but more what it represents. We are using it as a conceptual framework to show the scope, bidirectional and forward thinking nature of the Belt and Road Initiative.

During the two months, we will aim to visit two dozen BRI-related infrastructure projects. These will include intermodal terminals, ports, residential developments, new roads and railways across Eurasia. When we visit, we will engage with the workers, managers, strategists and thinkers there to understand the developments.

We are interested in this ongoing infrastructure integration and the promises that Eurasia is forging into a coherent and contiguous whole. Bruno Maçāes argues this in The Dawn of Eurasia. We will be meeting him in Istanbul.

The trip will take 64 days and cover 10,000 miles across 18 countries, and will require three visas. It was going to be five but due the ongoing issues in Russia we decided to cut out this axis and focus more on the developments in Central and Eastern Europe. Our route also intermingles with the historic Silk Road. The Belt and Road Initiative strongly alludes to this but there will be little time to engage with its archaeological legacies as it is not our focus.

I will travel the entirety of the route with Tom Micklethwait. Tom studies Mathematics and Russian at Georgetown University. His languages skills will be indispensable in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Istanbul we will be joined by Will Chamberlain for two weeks who studies with me at St Andrews University. Rob Krawczyk, whose interest is in the spatial connections emerging from BRI, will also join in the South Caucasus until our terminus in Yiwu. We have a great team and this trip would not have been possible without the hard work everyone has put in.

Lynne Corner is director of VOICE – Valuing Our Intellectual Capital and Experience – based at the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing. VOICE works with citizens to co-develop approaches, products and services that meet the challenges of global population ageing

My interest in ageing is long-standing – I was very close to my grandparents throughout my childhood, and was always struck by their wisdom, perspective and how much knowledge they had acquired over their lifetime. Of course, the number of people aged 80 years or older will have almost quadrupled between the years 2000 and 2050 to 395 million, and so more children will know their grandparents and great-grandparents.

After graduating, I spent time working in South America and the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, arriving not long after Hurricane Gilbert and subsequent tropical storms had devastated large parts of the island. The older women of the community I was living with were particularly impressive in their resilience, with positive attitudes to rebuilding infrastructure and strengthening communities for the future. Their focus and energy stayed with me and cemented my interest in working on healthy ageing.

My early experience of ageing in low-and middle-income countries remains very relevant as they will experience the most rapid and dramatic demographic change. It took more than a century for France’s population of over-65s to double, yet it will take less than 25 years for countries such as China and Brazil to experience the same growth.

I had no intention of being an academic. But I saw a job advert to work with a professor who had written a really thought-provoking book on ageing that I had read while at university. I applied as I was curious to meet him, and the rest, as they say, is history. Over the last 20 years, I have been based in Europe’s largest research institute on ageing and my work has spanned an incredibly diverse range of topics and disciplines – from health to housing, transport and digital technology, social inclusion and sustainability. Approaches to successful ageing demand a multi-disciplinary approach, and appreciation of global and local cultural and socio-economic contexts and drivers. Geographical skills and understanding have been fundamental to every project I’ve been involved in.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with inspirational colleagues, particularly Professors Tom Kirkwood and Jim Edwardson, both former directors of Newcastle University Institute for Ageing. They pioneered positive approaches to ageing, dispelling many myths, assumptions and stereotypes that persist about older people, and stressed the opportunities associated with ageing, along with the importance of looking at ageing across the life course, rather than ageing just being about oldness per se. Great inequalities persist, but in Europe and the US, the over-55s are the wealthiest demographic, spending an estimated £15trillion by 2020. This is changing just about every aspect of society.

CV1992 Graduated in Geography from University of Liverpool1999 Obtained PhD in Gerontology from Newcastle University2002 Joined the Institute for Ageing at Newcastle University2007 Established VOICE North as an organisation to engage with and involve older people in research and policy 2017 Became director of VOICE, at the National Innovation Centre for Ageing

The members of VOICE are just a joy to work with. Thousands of citizens from across the UK, and increasingly internationally, enthusiastically contribute their insights about what is needed and possible to meet the challenge of global population ageing. People are from all walks of life, and backgrounds, who have huge collective experience both from their working lives and lived experience. As a growing community, VOICE members are creative and ambitious about what can be achieved, and their energy and commitment are extraordinary. What is striking is their appetite to learn about shared experiences of ageing from different cultures and the interconnectedness of places and communities in which we live and work.

We urgently need to innovate, to think differently about how we deal with this unprecedented demographic transition, the choices we make for managing this now and in the future. But I am convinced that human resilience and capacity to innovate and adapt will mean that we will develop sustainable approaches and creative solutions that will enable individuals to live both longer and healthier lives, and for societies to reap the benefits. Directly empowering citizens and harnessing their mental capital and experience is key to our collective success.

Lloyd Figgins is founder of LFL Global Risk Mitigation consultancy, and a regular commentator to international media on issues of safety and security. His new book, The Travel Survival Guide, is out now

My background is former police officer, former soldier, and former expedition leader. I work now in concentrating on keeping people safe when they operate overseas. That includes a lot of people who are doing scientific research; these are people who are going out to some of the more remote parts of the world, and sometimes some of the more dangerous parts of the world.

We need to understand our own risk appetite. For some people, going on holiday to southern Spain could be really adventurous. But for others, spending an extended period of time in somewhere such as Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan might be fine for their risk appetite. So everyone needs to understand what their own comfort zone is and prepare accordingly.

Make sure you do your preparation. Make sure you know what you’re getting into. Speak to other people who’ve just come back from a place. The time we’re most vulnerable is when we first arrive in a new destination because we don’t have a baseline of what is normal. It’s only when we understand that can we start spotting anomalies, and put in procedures to look after ourselves.

The things that people are often really worried about are so rare. Your chances of getting caught up in a terror event are one in 20 million. Equally being involved in an air crash – there are little things you can do; sitting at the rear of an aircraft is a lot safer than sitting at the front of it, never be more than five rows away from an emergency exit – but statistically, your chances of becoming an airline fatality are one in about eight or nine million.

When we look at issues that are most likely to affect travellers, first and foremost it’s going to be some sort of gastrointestinal illness because they haven’t looked at how that food is prepared. Street food is notoriously bad for giving you bugs. Even something as simple as choosing where you’re going to eat makes a big difference.

If you look at the WHO statistics, 1.2 million people are killed in traffic accidents across the world every year. Most of those are occurring in low- to middle-income countries, the very places we like to travel. When we’re travelling we think, ‘Well, no one else is wearing seat-belts, so we don’t have to wear a seatbelt.’ But the laws of physics still apply.

The whole idea behind writing The Travel Survival Guide is to highlight what the issue is, what the problem is, what we can do to improve the odds, then a checklist at the back of each chapter, and a story that goes with it that actually makes it real. It’s not a safety book. I don’t want it to be a safety book. I want it to be an adventure book that’s actually going to teach you something.

CVJoined the police aged 19 and worked in specialist units (date not provided for security reasons)After leaving the police joined the army and trained to become an expedition leader (no date for same as above)1999 Narrowly avoided being kidnapped in the jungles of Colombia during the height of the civil war2012 Rowed 3,200 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, the first non-stop, unsupported row by a pair from Morocco to Barbados2018 Publishes The Travel Survival Guide

I’ve been honest where I’ve made mistakes. None of us are perfect. We do get it wrong. But there are other occasions in there where I got it right, and those can be life-changing moments, where you have what we would refer to as a ‘near-miss’. But it does then mean the next time you’re faced with that you’re going to do it slightly differently.

In the jungles of Colombia in the mid-1990s, there was a civil war going on. If you were a Westerner you were deemed to be either working for the CIA or the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]. We were confronted by a group of armed militia, who I have no doubt whatsoever were summing up what we would be worth when they kidnapped us. But being sat around the fire with those guys and talking to them about the state of Colombia – the civil war, how families had been torn apart, actually getting to know a bit about them – there would have been things within that conversation where we humanised ourselves to them. We were no longer merchandise, we were human beings. I think that is what tipped it in our favour.

Is the world becoming more dangerous? Probably not. But, do we hear about it more often? Yes, because of social media, and everything else. I don’t like using the term ‘health and safety’, because it conjures up images of a ‘nanny state’. We use the term ‘risk management’, or ‘personal resilience’. Those sorts of terms are going to be more in tune with what you’re doing, in order to protect yourself and those with you.

Kristy Leissle is a scholar of the global cocoa and chocolate industries. She is a lecturer at the University of Washington Bothell, where she teaches Global Studies. Her new book, Cocoa, is out now

I think my grandpa was the earliest person in my life to inspire my love of chocolate because he fed it to me regularly. I don’t remember any time in my life when I didn’t love chocolate more than anything else. It just seems like something that’s always been in me. I have distinct memories of the boardwalk on Jersey Shore where my cousins persuaded me to get an orange flavoured ice-cream and I felt this profound – disappointment is almost not strong enough – but I remember it, so chocolate has always been there.

When I was first starting out as an academic for my PhD, I never would have pitched chocolate as my idea. I entered into it at a moment where we were just at a point when you could study it without people raising an eyebrow at you. Now it’s considered very fashionable to study foods. Chocolate itself is never-ending in what you can learn about the world, it’s taken me down so many roads that I never imagined I would go, as well as different intellectual pathways. It’s hard for me to think of another food, even coffee, that would have allowed me to do the work I’ve done.

Even though I’ve just written a book called Cocoa, most of my engagement is with chocolate, which is a different thing entirely. Cocoa is the raw material that we use to make chocolate, it’s the seed of the tree theobroma cacao. From my perspective I may have a set of ideas, priorities and desires for this industry, and they might not be the ones a farmer would share. A woman growing cocoa in Ghana might have a totally different set of ideas from a man growing cocoa in Costa Rica. For me if there’s one thing I really hope people take away from this book it’s that there’s always something more to learn, there’s always another perspective that’s just as valid and important.

Fair trade has done a tremendous amount, here at the consumer end, to help people understand that a chocolate bar is not a guilt-free pleasure, that there’s injustice at every step until a bar reaches your hand. It can have a really powerful effect in terms of the way farmers think about themselves and their capacity to organise. It requires farmers to communicate with each other as a collective, rather than as individuals, and to me that’s one of the most important aspects of the label.

CV1997 Gained an MSt in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford2000 Worked with the US Peace Corps teaching English in Benin, West Africa2001-2008 Gained a PhD in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington2008 Began lecturing at University of Washington2009 Became 'Dean of Beans' at the Theo Chocolate Academy2010-2013 Was Education Director for the NW Chocolate Festival

What I’ve seen as a more powerful and impactful use of fair trade money is when it’s invested back into communities. Maybe that means an ambulance or water pump, but whatever it means, it allows them to make decisions that can have bigger ripple effects than just giving farmers more money.

In West Africa alone there are two million farmers spread across this vast region. It takes me at least a day usually to get to one village, how do you impact people on this scale? It’s not realistic, so you do what you can. It’s logistically impossible to touch everybody’s lives, whereas here it’s not an unachievable goal to say ‘I want every single chocolate consumer to have at least heard of fair trade.’ We could do that, we might have done it already. Someone once said to me, ‘better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness’ and if that’s what fair trade has done, then that is a tremendous thing.

The story I probably carry with me the most is from 2013 when I was in Ghana with another researcher, Lauren McCarthy. The research Lauren was using with the farmers required them to draw a tree that represents their households. One of the women in Lauren’s group asked, could she still do the exercise if she’d never used a pen. My world is words, my small candle that I light in this industry is writing that I hope educates people, it’s everything I do, and to confront the reality that this woman had never used a pen was such a stark contrast.

Collectively we all need something to inspire us. We elevate ourselves as a society when we take these pursuits, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s chocolate or something else. We can take anything in the world and do our own ethical explorations there. For me those explorations have intertwined with my journey in chocolate. If I think about this book and how I hope people use it, obviously I hope people learn something, but I hope it’s part of someone’s journey.

Daniel Hume is a naturalist and wilderness adventurer. He was also the head of operations at Woodlore, Ray Mears’ School of Wilderness. His debut book, The Art of Fire, is on sale now

I grew up in the countryside, Suffolk, so I had the outdoors on my doorstep. But the one aspect that stood out for me was having a little fire in the woods and sitting around it. It was so exciting. It meant you could go out, even on a cold day. It connected me to the outdoors more. Even today, when I’m hundreds of miles from anywhere, just in the wilderness somewhere, as soon as you light a fire, it just makes it feel like a home.

I wanted to meet people that still remembered or used fire skills for real. I thought it would be incomplete if I was doing the ‘fire plough’ – a Pacific technique – in Britain, it wouldn’t quite be right. To do this properly, I needed to go to those places and see what was there, to talk to the people and take photos. I went to central New Guinea, in the highlands on the Indonesian side, and stayed with the Dani people. They used traditional lighters, they had matches, but they lived a long way from the town so they were still using the ‘fire thong’. There was this mix of modern and old knowledge and technology.

For the first time I saw people carrying fire, that was really interesting. I knew people did it, but I’d never really seen it. One chap I met on the streets of Rabaul in East New Britain took some coconut fibres, plaited it in three strand plaits, and made a fuse as thick as your finger and a couple of feet long. He set alight to it and showed me how it smouldered like a cigar.

I’ve been to the Philippines 12 or 13 times. That’s where the ‘fire saw’ is from so I searched out people on a couple of different islands who still make fire with one. I’ve been to Canada. I went into Scandinavia many times, mainly up in the Arctic, and in the Sami reindeer herding areas. I’ve been all over Indonesia. And Namibia, of course. That’s fascinating.

Daniel Hume, author of The Art of Fire (Image: Penguin / Nick Pope)

In New Britain I also saw the Baining fire dance. The Baining are a tribe in East New Britain. They build a big fire, and dress up in leaves, paint themselves, and wear these big masks with large eyes. There’s a choir of other guys that are beating bamboo tubes on the ground, so you get this hollow resonating beat. They just dance around the fire and actually run through it, kicking the embers up in the air. It goes on for several hours, and really celebrates the fire.

I went to one village and asked if I could see the fire plough, if they could show me how they make fire traditionally. They jumped to it, these young guys got a piece of wood and they started rubbing the two bits together. Although I didn’t intervene, I could see that – this sounds incredibly arrogant – it wasn’t going to work, because I’d learnt these skills and I could see that they hadn’t had to rely upon it. It was a tricky situation because I didn’t want to jump in and say ‘That’s not how you do it’.

Luckily an older man came along and saw what we were doing. By this time the whole village had gathered round, 30 or 40 people, all looking at these young lads absolutely going for it, rubbing these two bits of wood together, smoke pouring off, but it just wasn’t going to work. They’d obviously seen it, but hadn’t had to learn exactly how to do it, how to be dependent upon it. This old man got his machete out and re-carved the piece they held. He sat down and in 20 seconds he had a little smouldering ember. The whole village was absolutely delighted. For the rest of the day everyone picked up any piece of wood they could and were trying to do it. It’s almost like we, in going there and asking for it, breathed life back into it.

Wherever I went on this project people absolutely welcomed me with open arms. Not so much in the highlands of New Guinea. I think that’s still a place where the modern world has a presence, of course, but it doesn’t reach out very far and people have to depend on the old skills. They’re still very much alive. In the Philippines things are disappearing quite fast. Things are becoming lost because the islands are easy to access and so things are changing there quite fast. But it tends to be the old men that remember. Most people don’t have to depend upon it.

CV

1989Born in Suffolk2006 Begins working at Ray Mears’​ Woodlore School of Wilderness2007 Accompanies Ray Mears to Namibia to learn tracking, bush survival and spend time with the San bushmen2009 First trip to Arctic Sweden, learning – and later leading – expeditions on Arctic survival2011Promoted to Head of Operations at Woodlore2014 Begins traveling internationally to learn traditional fire craft, starting in the Philippines2017 Publishes The Art of Fire: The Joy of Tinder, Spark and Ember

This was published in the January 2018 edition of Geographical magazine.

Hans Friederich is the director general for INBAR, the International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation, a multilateral development organisation of 42 member states aimed at the worldwide promotion of bamboo and rattan as an alternative resource

There was a policy in China over 20 years ago to stop cutting down trees, and that had two direct implications. One was the import of timber from outside China, the other was to look for alternative resources. Somewhere at the highest level a decision was made to promote bamboo and that resulted in the planting of three million hectares in the last 25 years. The bamboo industry in China, the total development and domestic sales are worth about $30 billion.

India actually has more bamboo naturally than China and has a domestic industry worth about $4billion. But it never put in place an institution to coordinate it. India very much still works in different states, each having their own rules and regulations. It’s very difficult to move bamboo from one Indian state to another without having to pay taxes and import duties. In some cases it’s even prohibited from being moved because it’s considered to be a timber or forest product and falls under forestry laws.

All bamboos are grass. More and more we try to talk about it as a crop because you can harvest it like any agricultural crop, and it grows back and you harvest it again and it keeps growing back. And that’s the beauty of it, it’s not like cutting trees where you have to replant and wait for another ten years for a seedling that you can actually do anything with.

Once you cut the bamboo or rattan it becomes a commodity. You can start trading it, or you can make all sorts of things from it. Basically, it’s a fibre so you can do anything with bamboo that you can do with wood fibre. You can use it in all kinds of construction, manufacturing, interior design, flooring, you name it.

The challenge to that is the effect of standards and guidelines. There are so many for construction. For example, for load-bearing construction you need a building code that allows you to use bamboo. And there are actually very few countries that have done that: three in the Andean countries – Peru, Ecuador and Colombia – and India.

China has not officially changed its building code, so for load-bearing purposes you can’t really use bamboo. But you can use it for interior design, cladding, and so on. There’s a textile industry; you can use bamboo for food – the bamboo shoot food industry is quite nicely developed and cattle fodder is something we are working on more and more, particularly in Africa. If you think about it, if pandas like it, other animals should like it as well. And that’s something we never thought about in the past. It’s actually got a fair amount of sugar, it’s healthy and once you feed it to any kind of livestock they love it.

One area we are particularly keen on is energy. I think bamboo can help Africa really find solutions to some of its major problems. Africa depends on wood energy and its not going to change soon. But most of that energy comes from charcoal, in particular from acacia and eucalyptus trees. So they’re cutting their forests to make charcoal to have household energy. If you plant bamboo to make charcoal from, you’re basically growing replenishing grass, so that would be a real opportunity. You would need a garden of about 10x15m for a household to have a renewable source of energy for the year, which is not much. And if you actually go that one step further and gasify it, you can have a generator that supplies a village.

We are engaging more and more with the climate change community and making the point that, as bamboo is a plant, it has photosynthesis, but grows faster than virtually anything else. It has a high biomass and is therefore a potential carbon sink. It actually does better at that than some of the wood plantations we have modeled in China.

Because farmers can actually plant bamboo in bad soils, it means that you can provide a certain adaptation component. If farmers add bamboo to their forestry systems, they have more hope to overcome any calamities that might come their way. We’re not saying to stop planting anything else, but in many countries they’ve just simply not thought about it. So how we can introduce bamboo into national renewable energy policies, and how we can get bamboo into the commitment for the climate change agreement is really our main job at INBAR. To make that case that bamboo isn’t just a forestry issue but an issue that fits in with many of the Sustainable Development Goals.

CV

1955 Born in the Netherlands

1978 Part of the Gunung Mulu National Park expedition with the RGS-IBG

1982 Obtained PhD in hydro-chemistry from Bristol University

1982 Member of a five-man limestone cave exploration team in the Gunung Sewu mountains in central Java

Prafulla Samantra led a 12-year legal battle against the Indian government’s plans to mine the Niyamgiri Hills, an oasis for biodiversity and rightful home of the Dongria Kondh people. He was awarded the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize for his actions

In the last 60 years there have been 60 million people displaced by industrial projects in the name of development. Even though indigenous groups represent roughly eight per cent of the population, they amount for 55 per cent of those 60 million displaced people.

For the past 12 years my work has focused on the Niyamgiri Hills, the home of the Dongria Kondh people. A densely forested string of mountains, it is also an important biodiversity hotspot. The forests are vital habitat for Bengal tigers and an important migration corridor for elephants. It is also the source of the Vamsadhara river, which provides water for millions on its way out to the Bay of Bengal.

As well as its land and water, Niyamgiri is known for bauxite rock – the primary ore in aluminium. In 2004, the Odisha State Mining Company signed with the London-listed, Vedanta mining company to build an open-pit bauxite mine. Because the Dongria Kondh live in remote areas and do not speak English, none of the public hearings about the plans would have been accessible to them. They had no idea the rights to their lands were being appropriated to a mining company – they had been denied their lawful right for informed consent.

There are actually very good laws in India that protect indigenous rights to land and the healthy environment – they are just not being upheld. Sacred tribal areas cannot be transferred to non-tribals without indigenous consent. That much has been enshrined in the Indian constitution since independence. Also, the land cannot be taken by the government forcefully. The problem is that constitutional rights have not been upheld and indigenous people have often been the victims of corporate land grabs. They have become disenfranchised and displaced of their rightful lands without their full awareness. Vedanta and the Odisha State Mining Company were ignoring this.

In 2006, a new ‘Forest Rights’ Act was introduced. Its full name is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act, and it recognised the rights of people such as the Dongria Kondh to their land. A fundamental aspect was that historical injustices were not repeated.

Even so, the state did not follow the constitution or the new act. Unfortunately, I believe all the mainstream political parties in India are beholden to corporations. Globalisation and development through resource exploitation has been high up on the agenda since independence, however, there has not been enough criticism of how these projects actually impact people on the ground. The question should be ‘Who are we developing for, if not the common people?’ If mining were to take place in Niyamgiri Hills, the indigenous groups would have seen very little of the profits.

I went through the Niyamgiri region on foot and by bicycle in order to visit remote groups and to avoid notice from mining advocates. I met with the Dongria Kondh to communicate the situation and together we filed a petition to the Supreme Court declaring that the proposed mine was unconstitutional and illegal. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in our favour and mining was banned.

The ruling is a huge success for the Dongria Kondh and a symbolic success for indigenous people all over India. Even if it had not ruled in our favour, the process of challenging development in the Supreme Court can be empowering for people.

Everywhere in the country, indigenous people are now pushing the state to implement and honour the act and give more agency to their own indigenous forms of government. There are now more than 200 people-led movements to protect resources, be they lakes, forests, rivers or coasts. These groups are essential not only for social justice but also to global climates as the accumulation of greenhouse gases starts from activities at a local level.

Mining is banned now, however, the existing aluminium plant in the Niyamgiri Hills is still a threat. It is operating at a low capacity – having lost the rights to the nearby bauxite ore in the Supreme Court ruling – but still pollutes the nearby rivers, air and soil. As its materials must be imported from elsewhere, there is no logic that the plant should exist in Niyamgiri, and our next priority is to dismantle it. The constitution and the Forest Act is in our favour, but so far the state is too scared to implement it.

[widgetkit id=262]

CV

1952 Born in Odisha1970s Obtained degrees in law and economics1975Arrested and jailed for opposition of the India Emergency1990s Opposed the construction of Tata steel plant in Gopalpur2004 Began work in the Niyamgiri Hills2005 Petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene for Dongria Kondh2013Helped win Supreme Court verdict on behalf of tribals2017 Received the Goldman Prize for the Environment

This was published in the November 2017 edition of Geographical magazine.

Regina ‘Gina’ Lopez, an environmental activist, former Environmental Secretary to Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, and member of the business elite, has been awarded the 2017 Seacology Prize for her opposition to mining and work to improve ecosystems across the islands of the Philippines

The Philippines is blessed with unrivalled biodiversity, helped by the fact that we are an island nation. We have many endemic island species – species that cannot be found anywhere else. Open-pit mining, if allowed to continue in such ecological significant areas, could pollute the water, the air and destroy the long-term value of these places as sustainable resources for the people who live there, or for ecotourism projects. It is short-sighted.

Wherever there is mining, people suffer. Farmers and fisherman find it harder to do their jobs and health deteriorates. Pro-miners’ main argument is that it creates jobs, but at what cost? You create a few jobs so that thousands can suffer – is that the kind of economy you want to build? The suffering is for generations. After mining, water sources have to be detoxified generations afterward, something that the companies often neglect to do. Of course, it will create a few jobs and put up some schools in the beginning but there are other ways to work and to educate.

In Basay province, the toxicity is 500 times over the maximum level, and the mining stopped there in 1982. However, when I stood in front of a few hundred locals to talk about it, I was scared because they didn’t seem worried. Then I realised that it is probably because it is all they know. What happens when the generation that could remember fish in the sea and clean water are all gone? All the young people will accept this as reality as its the only one they have ever known – there is no reference point for when it was better for them. It is a shifting baseline, a death of consciousness.

Mines in Luzon (Image: ABS-CBN Foundation)

Palawan Island was where I first discovered the destructive nature of open-pit mining. It is home to several indigenous communities such as the Molbog, the Batak and the Palaw’an people. Many live in poverty, despite the fact that it is breathtakingly gorgeous, the number one island destination on the planet. It has 40 per cent of the country’s remaining mangrove forests and 30 per cent of its coral reefs. It is also very mineralised. So when I arrived there were over 100 applications for open-pit mining, I set up the Save Palawan movement to oppose them.

From then, my opposition to mining drew a lot of criticism from the government. Many of our elected representatives have a stake in open-pit mining economy and do not want to see it banned in the Philippines.

When I was appointed as Environmental Secretary to President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016, I dismissed 100 people from the department because they were involved in large-scale mining such as a huge project planned for the breadbasket of Mindanau. Then I cancelled the approval of 75 mines in the pipeline. After just ten months I was dismissed because they felt I did not follow due process for these actions, though I felt that I was upholding the people’s rights in the Philippine constitution. That was what was important to me.

Any development that is carried out in the Philippines has to be done with the constitution at its heart which says, in no uncertain terms, in many areas that social justice and common good is the way to go. Instead, the law is often used to support business interests, and where there is opposition, the military is used to support those interests.

That’s not to say that all forms of tourism are the answer. Any ecotourism development has to first and foremost answer the needs of the host community and its surroundings. We have an island called Borocay, which is one of our most popular destinations. But the people that live on the island are separate from it. That’s not the kind of tourism that we need. We need non negotiable commitment to people’s lives.

The prize money is going to be used to set up a new foundation called ILOVE – or Investments in Loving Organisations for Village Economies. It is based on the fundamental idea that local and environmental needs should be at the centre of new projects and investment. In the end, development that doesn’t truly care for people will eventually become exploitative.

Seacology is a US-based island conservation organisation, which awards the $10,000 prize each year to honour those who have shown exceptional achievement in preserving island environments and culture

Get the best of Geographical delivered straight to your inbox by signing up to our weekly newsletter and get a free collection of eBooks!

Bonita Norris is an adventurer, public speaker and television presenter, who climbed Mount Everest in 2010 after attending an RGS-IBG lecture two years earlier. Her new book, The Girl Who Climbed Everest, is on sale now

I wasn’t driven to climb Everest fromhearing about it as a kid, or anything like that. If I hadn’t gone to that [RGS-IBG] lecture, I don’t think I would have ever started climbing; it was that moment that the spark was ignited. The fact that I saw Kenton Cool and Rob Casserley on stage, they both just seemed really down to Earth, hearing them say things like ‘You don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to climb Everest’. Having that person in front of you is so important. If someone is there to lead the way or has gone somewhere before you then it’s always much easier.

I love climbing. I loved the idea of climbing Everest. Was I a world-class climber, or anywhere near that? No, but I was also a lot more experienced than most people on the mountain, because I’d climbed an 8,000m peak before that. At the time I didn’t think that my experience was an issue. But I look back and realise I was nowhere near as skilled a mountaineer as I am now. The truth is that Everest is not the kind of mountain you’d go to if you were a world-class climber. Just to go and climb the normal route is for people that aren’t the world’s best climbers – that’s just the way it is.

I left the mountain feeling quite sad to be going. There was really no world outside Everest for me during all that time. I never thought about anything but that mountain, and then suddenly it was gone. I was quite traumatised by that. When I got home, I was sitting with my parents on the sofa, and the news came on: ‘Youngest British woman to climb Everest returns home’. It did feel like ‘is this real?’ For weeks on end I could open any newspaper and see a story about myself. I could never have imagined it on that scale. It was just crazy, the press banging on the door. It was a very confusing time that you’ll never be prepared for unless you’ve actually gone through it before.

I’ve met and debated with people that really don’t like Everest, but have never been anywhere near it. They don’t like what it represents. For some people Everest is seen as a rich man’s playground, where nature and indigenous locals are exploited for the sake of a photograph on the summit. I get that, because there are those kinds of people there. But they are the tiniest percentage of people. Most people that I’ve ever met climbing are just lovely, caring, completely inspired by nature, want to protect the world that they live in, and just want to make the most of their life on Earth. So I don’t have a problem with the media focusing on Everest at all, but I do have a problem when it’s this sensationalised idea of Everest, which is actually nothing like the Everest that I know and love.

Lhotse was a much more difficult climb than Everest. That makes it more special. When I stood on the summit of Lhotse it did feel like the end of a chapter, this overwhelming feeling that four years of work had led to this moment. It was never about Everest when I look back with hindsight. It was always about Lhotse. But I had to go to Everest to get there.

People are fascinated with the climbing histories of Everest and Lhotse, and I guess I’m a part of that. But I have to remind myself that I climbed those mountains. There is a real sense, with time passing, of detachment from them. I do think about moments on those mountains every day, just that nostalgia, wanting to be back there. I did a big expedition last year to K2 and loved being back in the mountains. I felt so at home. It’s not about standing on the summit or anything like that. It’s about being in those places, and being around the people that are in those places.

I’m very lucky to have some verysuccessful friends in everything from climbing to business to athletics. A lot of them have struggled with eating problems in the past. For a girl to have gone through her entire life and not had a weird relationship with food, they will have done really well. I think that more and more guys are going down the problem route too. It’s not something that people really talk about. I have a voice with this book, and I don’t want to avoid such an important situation, because generally that is what happens, and that’s why eating disorders are such a big issue for young women.

I think a lot of women that have overcome eating disorders have learnt the same lessons that I have, that if you want to change something, it starts with you. You can’t rely on anyone else. That’s a really powerful thing to learn; even though it has come from a bad place, it can be a positive thing going forward.

CV

1987 Born in Reading

2008 Attended RGS-IBG lecture about climbing Mount Everest

2009 Graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with a degree in Media Arts

2010 Became the youngest British woman to summit Mount Everest

2011 Reached the North Pole, becoming the youngest person in the world to reach both Everest and the North Pole

Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. His latest book is ‘Defiant Earth’, an analysis of the Anthropocene

What has happened in the last few decades is that the Earth itself has undergone a really profound rupture in its functioning. As we go into this new geological epic, the Anthropocene, we’re not talking about a continuation of trends of environmental damage that we all know about. We’re talking about something radically different. It’s no longer the passive, stable, clement, natural world that we have become accustomed to over 10,000 years. It is now a fractious, chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable entity – which is defiant.

It’s a challenge not only to conventional ways of understanding the natural world as a repository of resources; it’s also a profound challenge to traditional environmentalists. Traditional environmentalists’ understanding of the Earth, to see it as a passive victim of human rape and pillage, is simply no longer true. We’re dealing now with an angry beast on the rampage, one that is, in a way, fighting back.

I think it will actually take most people a long, long time to get this, because it does fundamentally challenge how we understand the natural world. It is so profound that I think it is on a par with the arrival of modernity, or even of civilisation itself.

Rather than just destroying an ecosystem, wiping out a species, or transforming a landscape, we’ve disturbed the functioning of the Earth’s system as a whole, so much so that we have brought about a new geological epoch, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. We’re looking at something entirely new and different, and a lot more frightening.

Both the power of humans and the power of the Earth are now operating at a higher level than ever before. Humans are now so powerful, with our technologies and the sheer scale of our activities, that we can change the geological course of the Earth as a whole. And yet, the Earth system has become more energetic, as the climate scientists say. There are more wildfires, more storms, more heatwaves, more droughts. So there’s a kind of power struggle going on.

You have to make heroic assumptions about human capacities, and the nature of the Earth system, to believe that we can use our technologies to bring this raging beast under our control. This paradox actually is, in a way, the deepest thought in the book. It took me years of thinking and working on it before I finally twigged to that.

There is a real danger that people say ‘Yes, I hear what you’re saying, but what must we do?’ Leaping to what should we do is a way of not dwelling on what we’ve really done. I want us to dwell on what we have done. This book is about stopping to think. There’s no going back to the Holocene. We can’t turn back the geological clock. We are going into an unknown and dangerous world.

So how do we deal with that, emotionally, on a day-to-day basis? We all have to. It’s hard, but there are a couple of things we shouldn’t do, and one is pretend it’s not happening. It’s kind of an understandable response – we feel powerless, helpless, and think all we can do is get on with our lives and put it out of our minds. But we, as responsible creatures, have to face up to it, because there are things we can do. We can, for example, demand that our governments act, that they actually put their foot on the accelerator to decarbonise the economy.

The other thing we ought to try to avoid is becoming trapped in the slough of despair, which is a real danger. I know people who have been there, and it’s horrible to watch. What causes me great anguish is to see young people getting caught up in that.

While it’s natural to despair when we confront the facts, humans are capable of moving beyond that and begin to act. Not denying what’s happening, but facing up to it, accommodating it, and then moving on in a way that attempts to make the best of the situation. Humans are good at that. Where we’ll end up in 20, 30, 40 or even a hundred years time, we don’t know. Those of us who are honest to the facts know that it’s not going to be a glorious utopia, but let’s hope one way or another that most of us will muddle through.

Rodrigue Katembo risked his life to expose the corruption behind illegal oil exploration in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Goldman Environment Prize for his work

At first I thought they were just visitors. Two pickup trucks were trying to make their way across the park towards Rwindi while I was on a patrol protecting the elephants close to Mabenga in the southeast. The trucks’ drivers went to the patrol station and said they wanted to have a meeting at my own home. Without really thinking about what this could mean I agreed to meet them there. When they arrived they said that they had authorisation from the capital, Kinshasa, to start oil exploration in the park in Virunga.

Because there are national laws against mining and oil exploration in the park, I was surprised. Establishing an oil well would go against the conservation objectives – Virunga is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it is home to 220 of the last remaining mountain gorillas. Nonetheless, they told me they wanted to start a base for SOCO, an international oil company based in London. I asked if they had talked to my boss and they said ‘yes we have authorisation’. Then they showed me a bag of money and I was told to take it. I said no, and asked them to leave the park.

After this I went to see my boss to report what had happened. We both realised that SOCO was going to try everything possible to get into the park. It had the money, it had authorisation from Kinshasa and it was already starting to bribe the security service, the National Intelligence Agency and the army. In parts of the DRC, people need money and SOCO was able to provide it. Meanwhile, pitted against so many forces, the park wardens could be destabilised. Looking at the situation, we decided to put some strategies in place. One of these was to build a file collecting information about the illegal activity.

It has been really dangerous to do this kind of undercover work, to film and document this information. It didn’t take long for SOCO to realise what I was doing and it became threatening. One of the worst incidents was when I tried to stop it installing a communications antennae at one of the fisheries. The army and intelligence service came to stop me, beat me up and took me back to Rwindi station where I was put in front of my wardens. They beat me up again in front of them to scare them and said that I was ‘the face of the people that opposed oil exploration’, that they would kill me and that if anyone opposed oil exploration they were going end up like this.

They brought me back to the city of Goma and during the transit they were arguing about when to kill me. They were worried about being seen. Luckily, they instead put me in prison and said that I had betrayed the country and deserved to die. I told them I just wanted them to respect the law. They left me in jail for 17 days, but thanks to great pressure at international level I was released – but under strict conditions. I had to visit the National Intelligence Agency every day so they could keep track of me.

{youtube}kO1PJNJv5hI{/youtube}

I realised that they were just waiting for the right time to ‘make me disappear’ and that soon they would kill me on one of these visits. I feared for my life and fled for Nairobi. While I was there, my boss came to visit me, but four days after arriving back in the DRC, he was ambushed while he drove from the park from Goma and shot five times in the legs and stomach. He was lucky not to die.

Between 2010 and 2015 we saw some of this biggest death toll of park rangers. We think this is related to the pressure from oil extraction from the park and that they were just collateral damage. The worst part is that these incidents happen and there is no investigation. Park rangers have died, my boss was ambushed and I was imprisoned but no one has been holding the perpetrators to account.

In 2015, I moved to work as a chief warden at Upemba National Park. It is the oldest national park in the DRC and is home to some of the world’s most abundant and diverse wildlife. There are similar threats from companies interested in hydroelectric and mining activity, especially for precious gold, emeralds and coltan – a mineral found in almost every smartphone.

The park is 8,000 square miles, too large to patrol with a single truck and we have less than half the number of rangers that we need. This has allowed the Mai-Mai militia group to encroach on the boundary. We are campaigning to have Upemba recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site to try and ensure that it is better protected. For now, however, the work is still too dangerous, so I live apart from my wife and children.

CV

2003 Joined the DRC wildlife authority2011 Noticed unauthorised oil exploration in Virunga2011-2014 Worked to expose illegal oil activity in Virunga National Park2013 Arrested for preventing communications antenna2014 Undercover film published in the award-winning documentary, Virunga2015 Transferred to Upemba National Park for his safety2016 Helped shut down eight quarries in Upemba and removed more than 1,400 small-scale coltan miners2017 Received Goldman Environment Prize

This was published in the August 2017 edition of Geographical magazine.

Kerstin Forsberg is the director of Planeta Océano, a marine conservation organisation based in Peru, and was made a Rolex Laureate for her work protecting giant manta rays in the country

Manta rays are an iconic flagship species: for me they’re one of the main representatives of the elasmobranchs, which include sharks and rays. They’re the smartest of the rays: they have this big brain-to-body size proportion. Now we’re facing such a critical situation for sharks and rays globally – it’s one of the most threatened groups there is on the planet – conservation of giant mantas is a real eye-opener for the conservation of sharks and rays and marine environments more generally.

The fishermen we were working with [at Planeta Océano] were keen to talk about giant manta rays. They would sometimes talk about how the rays would interact with fishing nets. It was something that immediately sparked our interest, because at that time – around 2011 – giant manta rays were completely disregarded in Peru. The fishermen knew they were there, but they were seen as a species you’d accidentally harvest and then put back. The general community didn’t know, at some points, that manta rays even existed. If you look at pre-Inca ceramics and pre-Inca culture, there are potteries that show giant manta rays. So they were part of the culture but had somehow been forgotten.

Manta rays in Ecuador have been protected since 2010. But they were migrating into Peruvian waters and being harvested there. The harvest was mostly accidental, but occasionally intentional. Fishermen weren’t very dependent on the species – it wasn’t something that was extremely reliable. Maybe in a year we’d find something like a dozen mantas that had been harvested. The mantas didn’t really generate an economic value: it wasn’t a very high value meat.

We noticed that eco-tourism was probably the most long-term solution we could have for the conservation of the species. In the case of conservation, you need things to be self-sustainable. And if you want things to be self-sustainable, on one side you need to incorporate the community and the population; but on the other, you need things to work economically in the long-run. A lot of these market-based approaches are really important. Otherwise, you can’t get funding forever to be doing things.

There’s no fixed situation for every challenge. Everything has pros and cons and everything has to be well-managed. In the case of eco-tourism, it is a long-term solution because there is a market in northern Peru – a growing market, I’d say – of tourists in that area. It’s one of the most important coastal destinations in the country, even more because there’s a proposal for a Marine Protected Area nearby.

What we want is for eco-tourism to serve as a self-sustaining platform for science and monitoring. So when the tourists and the fishermen go out to sea, they will also be collecting data that will be fed into this adaptive management system so we can see what goes well and what doesn’t. That’s a really big component of our work – engaging people in research and following certain protocols about the best way is to swim with mantas, what’s the capacity of boats that can convene in a certain area, and so on.

It’s not that we don’t want the fishermen to be fishermen anymore. We’re giving them an additional source of income. So at the moment what we want is for them to not harvest giant manta rays and to instead become sustainable fishermen. In theory, if you really care about manta rays, you will care about its ecosystem and you’ll want to fish sustainably as well. But it’s not that we want to change their livelihoods. They’ll keep on fishing, but they’ll have this additional job that can generate income for their families.

In 2009 we founded a network called the Marine Educators Network in Peru. We work with over 50 schools; we build capacity and teachers, we integrate the classrooms, we have an incubator project. We’re working with the ministries of education and the environment to develop a teachers’ guide for marine education.

We work a lot to generate multiplier effects within communities. So, for example, if I’m going to run an education programme, it’s not just me or my team going workshop by workshop. It’s us empowering the teachers to have the capacity to do that by themselves. It’s about generating a movement and a force that allows more people to become involved.

CV

1984 Born in Peru

1988 Family relocated to Vancouver, Canada

2006 Joined Projeto TAMAR in Brazil to monitor and protect sea turtles

2007 Obtained a BSc in biology at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina

2009 Started a Marine Educators Network to formally introduce marine issues into the local educational system in Tumbes, northwestern Peru; Founded Planeta Océano, a non-profit organisation conserving and restoring coastal and marine environments

Liz Bonnin is a biochemist, wild animal biologist, and BBC television presenter, known for hosting various science, nature, and wildlife programming. Her new show, Galápagos, is due to air this spring

I really view my career as a means to continue my education, in perhaps a broader way than I would have done had I stayed in academia. It’s given me the opportunity to read up on the latest cutting edge research in all different disciplines of science, and also allows me to learn about new ones.

I think my training ground couldn’t have been better, because I started on Bang Goes the Theory, covering all the different sciences. The natural world is beautifully complex, and finding a way to communicate the complexities is always a challenge. I think scientists are always challenged to communicate their work in a way that can be understandable to a broader audience, so it’s been really interesting to learn how to do that.

We’re looking to raise the bar withStargazing Live. It’s in its seventh year and we’re doing it live from the Southern Hemisphere for a change, we’re moving the entire team to an observatory in Australia. I’ve been filming some stories for the programme in the Pilbara desert, in Western Australia, working with some fantastic scientists looking at stromatolites and signs of early life and how that might help to inform the 2020 Mars Rover mission. It’s fascinating stuff.

The landscape in the Pilbara is one of only two in the world that is still looking the way our planet looked just as our solar system was forming. Three and a half billion years ago, that landscape resembled Mars quite a lot. So when you look at the rock formations and the remains of the bacterial life in those rocks, you can understand where might be the best places to look for similar signs of early life on Mars.

Recently what I’m most proud of is an episode of Horizon I made on the future of zoos, which was something I’d wanted to make for years. It didn’t really unfold quite as we expected. Unfortunately we came up against quite a lot of resistance from the zoo community. The science is irrefutable; these animals are suffering, and elephant populations are not sustainable in captivity. It was a real eye-opener. We look back on zoos from the Victorian era and think they were quite dreadful, but actually we haven’t moved on that much, and I think we’ll look back in another 50 or 100 years at the zoos of today and think ‘What were we doing?’

I’d like to be part of that movement to expedite the evolution of zoos. I don’t want zoos to shut, I just think it’s time for them to take on the scientific evidence and evolve and educate our population in a more productive way. That means having smaller species, little microhabitats where we can see everything relying on everything else, interacting with everything else, as opposed to seeing one large animal that’s swaying back and forth all day. There’s a great potential for zoos, and I want to be part of that solution.

The Galápagos has been described as a mini world, this remote, isolated place with an extraordinarily improbable mix of wildlife. I can’t believe I actually made it there; it was such a privilege. We had the chance to be on this amazing research vessel called the Alucia with a dedicated submarine team, two submarines that can go down to 1,000m, and explore the oceans with scientists from all over the world. Some were sampling Canal Bolívar and I had the chance to go down with them which was just mind blowing. Then we went up to Wolf Volcano where the last remaining pink iguanas are, working with scientists who are tagging and monitoring them, trying to figure out whether this is the last hurrah for the species.

We have a problem there with invasive species now that are really threatening a lot of the birds, insects and plants in a very real way. Climate, marine pollution, our use of plastics – the Galápagos is sitting in a place where a lot of plastics from all around the world end up. But also the people that are living there are also polluting in a way that we were doing many years ago, and it’s privy to all of the threats that we’re familiar with.

I’ve come back from that trip desperate to not only communicate the wonders of this planet and the incredible scientists who are working there to try and protect it, but also to try and get people to understand that everything they do here affects there. That you can see a beautiful series about the Galápagos, you can even be lucky enough to visit it. But if you go back to your regular life afterwards, you’re not really embracing ownership of a place that is so unique and so special and so belongs to you as well. Certainly with our actions it’s about getting your voice heard in a very real way now, not just thinking that it’s Ecuador’s problem, and its job to fix it. We’re all in this together.

CV

2009-2014 Co-presenter on Bang Goes the Theory

2010 Joins cast of Autumnwatch

2011 Co-hosts both Stargazing Live and Springwatch. Presenter on Egypt’s Lost Cities

Peter Willcox is the captain of the Greenpeace campaign boat, Rainbow Warrior. He has participated in environmental campaigns for Greenpeace across the world for over 30 years. His new book, Greenpeace Captain, is out now

I went to many civil rights demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating with the Selma to Montgomery march, a momentous occasion. It resonated with me. I grew up thinking, if I haven’t been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee then I haven’t amounted to very much. That was my bar.

It’s a deep seated desire in all of us to find a useful way to contribute to society. It’s an important element of overall happiness. When I was 19, I was number one in the draft lottery. I knew I wasn’t going to go to Vietnam, that was absolutely out of the question, so I got Conscientious Objector status and started sailing around on the Clearwater which had been declared Federally-approved CO duty.

I love to sail. When I come home from three months at sea, I often go out on my own little boat. My grandparents started the family off sailing. My aunts and uncles were all sailors, they grew up on the water in Staten Island. My dad was racing dinghies until a couple of years ago at the age of 95! People ask if I’m interested in racing them and I say ‘I’m not old enough!’

I came to Greenpeace through Bob Hunter’s book, Warriors of the Rainbow. I was so impressed with the non-violent, direct action. I knew from my experience with the civil rights movements that if you want to change people’s minds, it’s got to be through non-violent means. If you’re trying to win a war, then you kill people. But we’re not fighting a war. We’re in the game of trying to change people’s minds. You’re not going to do that by hitting them over the head or blowing up Shell tankers.

In a world of 15-year-old female suicide bombers, it’s hard to get the same ‘pop’ with the kind of actions that we did 20 years ago. I recognise that. I also recognise that the public isn’t quite as enamoured by our actions as they once were. I think that we’re going to be more selective about doing what I call ‘silly’ actions – like dressing up in penguin suits and things like that. Actions used for educating the public, for letting them know about situations, for making them aware and getting an issue into the public discourse. That’s their purpose. But they also inspire us, the people that are doing them. If you want to see an unhappy Greenpeace boat, go to one that hasn’t taken part in an action for a few months.

I have to say that if I look back at the last 40 years, I feel about as successful as a lead balloon. When I joined, I presumed that in five or ten years we’ll have written some good [anti-pollution] laws. At that time we felt like we were making some progress. In 1973, we found out about PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). People living along the Hudson River were suffering, the particles were washing up on the banks, becoming airborne and getting into everything. That’s when I thought, ‘This might be a little longer than five or ten years’. I never dreamed that we would be where we are today, where I feel like I’m fighting for the future of my kids. And losing the battle.

I feel as though we have to work as hard as we possibly can to mitigate the damage we’re creating. What we do now is one quarter of what we’ll have to do in five years time. It compounds every day. Some countries are doing a great job of changing, but now, in the ‘most powerful country in the world’, we’ve elected a president whose Secretary of State is going to be from ExxonMobil.

I was absolutely blown away when I heard that both Putin and Trump want to increase their nuclear stockpiles. If there’s something that is a complete waste of money – and a stupid thing to do – that’s it. We should be building windmills and solar farms, and they want to build nuclear bombs. Nobody can conceive of using them. We (the US) are the only nation that has used them. There are so many generals that have come out and said, ‘We don’t need more nukes, we’re not going to use them, they’re a terrible pain in the neck to maintain and they’re a waste of money.’ I have a little more faith in our generals than I do in our president.

There’s no question that a massive amount of spending and job creation for a green and sustainable energy future is the way to go. Business is moving there. Look at Denmark, Scotland, or Norway. They have fantastic wind farms. Some countries get it, they can see the future coming.

It’s a given that the poorer countries that didn’t create the problems will be the ones that suffer the most. We have a moral obligation to take care of our fellow men and women. I don’t think anyone can really debate that. We caused the problem, it’s on our hands: the US, China, the industrialised, first-world nations.

CV

1953 Born in Vermont

1965 Attended the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march

1976 Captained the Clearwater on the Hudson River

1981 Joined Greenpeace as a volunteer, became captain of the Rainbow Warrior four months later

1985 Was on board Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand when it was blown up by French military

1993 Exposed Russian dumping of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan

2000 Returned toxic waste to US embassy in Manila

2013 Arrested and imprisoned for two months by Russia for protests against oil drilling platforms in Arctic

This was published in the March 2017 edition of Geographical magazine.

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is a veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an NGO dedicated to the healthcare of Uganda’s 400 mountain gorillas as well as the human populations that surround Bwindi Impenetrable National Park

We share 98.4 per cent of genetic material with gorillas. Like us, they are great apes. So studying them often means human and veterinary medicine are intertwined.

The similarity means we can share diseases. Human populations can transmit illnesses to the gorilla populations and vice versa. In Bwindi Impenetrable Park this is especially likely as the forest has a hard edge. There are gorilla groups that frequently venture from the park into people’s gardens at its outskirts – local communities that were likely built on the gorillas’ old home range.

One of the first cases I had to deal with was a bad scabies outbreak. When it began, the gorillas were losing hair and developing white, scaly skin. A doctor of human medicine told me that scabies is the most common skin disease in Uganda. We administered the scabies medicine and the gorillas were cured.

We lost a baby gorilla to the outbreak. It lost almost all of its hair by the time the mother dropped it, which was the day after the treatment. Normally gorillas will hold onto their dead babies for a week until they rot before dropping them. But this baby had been so sick that her mother let go quite quickly. It meant that we were able to get a really good post mortem because it was a fresh sample. We were able to find lots of mites that were still alive. It was a difficult moment but it was reassuring to know we had treated the other animals with the right medicine.

To keep the gorillas healthy, the human population must be healthy. We set up CTPH to provide healthcare to the local communities to try and keep the park healthy. We help create volunteer networks that educate and encourage locals to maintain their health and hygiene. Meanwhile, we engage with traditional healers, who are locally respected, to help to refer likely HIV and TB patients.

“In some ways the gorillas are in less danger because people are becoming more used to them. However, the new worry is foreign diseases from tourists that the gorillas are not immune to”

We started looking at poverty as a determinant of health. Our studies have revealed a lot of indicators of poverty: the number of temporary homes, the lack of separate area for animals, lack of kitchen spaces. What people noticed was that these communities are really poor, especially the ones in the rural areas – which are those most visited by gorillas. It is not our main focus because there are many more specific NGOs that focus on poverty. But we need to bring the poverty element within the health program, because as long as people are still poor it is hard for them to be able to keep healthy.

The gorillas are loved and hated in the community. On one hand, many of the community members are employed by the park – around 90 per cent of the staff must be hired locally. So that is already a big positive impact. Plus 20 per cent of the park entry fee has to go to the communities. At the same time the locals get distressed when gorillas are around. They can be destructive in their gardens, especially when they find eucalyptus trees. They go crazy for the bark.

In some ways the gorillas are in less danger because people are becoming more used to them. However, the new worry is foreign diseases from tourists that the gorillas are not immune to. All the time we worry that they’ve caught something that you can’t see because it can take time for diseases to begin showing symptoms. To tackle this we use the gorilla health centre to analyse faecal samples. Every month we take samples from all the habituated groups – the ones that you can see – which regularly come into contact with people. When the results are abnormal we take more samples.

We have a gorilla census every four to five years so that we can collect samples from the unhabituated groups. We expect the gorillas in the centre of the park to be healthier because they have less interactions with humans. In a sense, the habituated ones are sacrificed for these wilder animals to bring in conservation money and to encourage people to protect all the gorillas. It would be dangerous to expose all of the gorilla groups to the same human pressure.

The solution could be to wear masks around the wildlife. I’m on a committee called the Mask Task Force – yes it sounds like a superhero name – which looks at the idea of making it obligatory for tourists to wear protective masks. It is already a policy in the DRC, but Rwanda is reluctant despite a lot of pressure. Because the major tourist competition for Uganda is Rwanda, both governments are worried that tourists will go to the other country. However, in a survey we found that the majority of tourists wouldn’t mind. People that come to see the gorillas often want what is best for the animals.

CV

1970 Born in Uganda

1995 Obtained bachelors degree in Veterinary Medicine from the Royal Veterinary College, University of London

1996 Returned to Uganda as the country’s first female veterinarian for wildlife

Duane Silverstein is the Executive Director of Seacology, a California-based NGO with a focus on islands. In 2016, it assisted Sri Lanka in protecting the entirety of its mangrove forests

Sri Lanka has become the first country in the world to protect all of its mangrove forests, and the first to open a mangrove museum. In the office we have been saying ‘pinch yourself you must be dreaming’ as the success in Sri Lanka has been beyond belief. We were confident that it would go well but the progress has been remarkable.

All the mangroves in the country have now been identified and half of them demarcated so far. Meanwhile, the museum itself is finished. It sits on the sea front, with glass walls through which it is possible to watch the mangroves. It has also been adopted by the Sri Lankan Department of Education and looks to be a popular location for school trips.

To protect the mangroves we are supporting 1,500 communities along the coast with job training and microloans. The idea is to support them in finding alternatives to forest clearance. In turn, the communities are responsible for the protection of 21 acres of mangroves each. So far, over a quarter of a million seedlings have also been planted, 50,000 of those with the help of the Sri Lankan navy.

I first became interested in islands and conservation while I was studying law at Concordia – which I was thoroughly uninterested in. However, through the law school I was offered an internship with an environmental organisation in Hawai‘i, working with native communities. Before that, I had rarely been west of New York.

Though I had grown up on an island (Long Island, the suburb of New York City) there was very little contact with the environment. The only fish I had seen were the dead ones at grocery stores. But snorkelling in Hawai‘i opened up that world. I was amazed that you could just stick your mask under the water and here were fish of thousands of colours that didn’t swim away when you came near.

Seacology is a grass roots environmental organisation, with a specific focus on islands. I was its first employee 20 years ago, quitting a secure job as the head of American NGO superpower, Goldman. Seacology’s founder, Paul Allan Cox, said to me: ‘you will need to be able to work with just $16,000 to begin with’ (for comparison, Goldman is a $400million endowment foundation). After a few months of consideration I replied: ‘under one condition, the office needs to be near enough to my home that I don’t need to tackle the San Francisco commute anymore.’ With two young kids and two mortgages, it was an insane career move. My wife was very supportive.

“Through their root systems, mangroves dissipate the energy from tsunamis and hurricanes and buffer the damage that can be caused by extreme weather”

We started with three projects and now have more than 260 across 57 countries. However, Sri Lanka stood out as a place we could begin a project on a national scale. It had already been hit by a tsunami so it knew about the importance of mangroves.

Outside the cricket pitch, Sri Lanka has had little positive publicity. However, when the mangrove conservation project was launched we saw nothing but good news. The development is giving the country something to be so proud of.

Our biggest challenge is that we had to raise $3.4million. Before this, Seacology’s biggest project was about $80,000 so this was quite a difference. Raising awareness is both the most frustrating and the most wonderful part of the job. Frustrating because very few people understand the importance of mangroves (lots will ask ‘mangroves, isn’t that the juicy fruit?’). It is wonderful because you get to explain how crucial they are as an ecosystem.

Somewhat ironically, another challenge has been the weather. There was some major flooding in the area of one of our nurseries. Our sister agency, Sudeesa, had to change the mangroves there to more water-prone species. There are 23 species in Sri Lanka in total. It’s an ironic challenge because one of the benefits of mangrove forests is that they help in the fight against global warming, which has exacerbated these record-breaking floods.

While the floods set us back two or three months, it also underscored our cause. Through their root systems, mangroves dissipate the energy from tsunamis and hurricanes and buffer the damage that can be caused by extreme weather.

I was once a comedy writer, and wrote freelance for Joan Rivers. It’s an unusual background, however without a sense of humour, conservation can be depressing at times. Equally, people are constantly telling you how amazing you are because of the money you can award, so one has to be on the alert in order to not become too arrogant. At Seacology, we have a motto to take our work very seriously, but not ourselves too seriously.

{youtube}75G2XNxZ2ms{/youtube}

CV

1980 Completed MA in Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley

1981 Became Executive Director of the Goldman Fund

1989 Established the Goldman Prize, the ‘Nobel Prize for the Environment’

For her work protecting South African black rhino populations, Cathy Dreyer won the Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa

We always say that a full moon used to be amazing, especially because we live in the place where the night skies are incredible. These days, all we do is wait out a full moon, because that’s when poachers target the rhinos. They cannot use torches because they might be detected, so they wait for bright nights. It’s a big reserve and we are never going to cover every single corner of it, so the full moon is always bad for us.

Black rhinos are in a pretty dire straits. While more white rhinos are being killed than black rhinos, we have fewer numbers to play with – there are only around 5,000 black rhinos left in the wild, compared to 20,000 white. There’s such a small number of them that one big poaching incident can have a disastrous impact. From our populations, we have lost seven this year – six that have died and one that is still surviving [poached but not killed]. That was just in a period of six months. We don’t have a lot of numbers to play with, so every one that you lose counts, especially when there are other parks that are losing black rhinos at similar rates. On a personal level it can be discouraging, and for some of the rangers who have been there for 20 or 30 years, it is like suddenly losing something that you have seen grow up. It weighs heavy on you.

One of our worst incidences involved three animals: a mum, a young calf, and an older calf. Black rhinos are often misunderstood to be aggressive and solitary, but they actually have quite close family bonds. Often, when a rhino mother has a calf, she chases away her old baby only for it to come back and help raise the new calf. In this case, poachers shot all three family members. Even though the baby was only six-months-old, they cut her whole face just to get as much horn as they could. Many of the other killed rhinos were breeding cows and they lost their foetuses. Events like that take out whole generations at once.

Despite our efforts, the demand for black rhino horn seems to be increasing and the amount of groups that are out there seem to be increasing – they are starting to spread out into other areas.

(Image: Tusk Conservation Awards)

To tackle that pressure, we have been making our populations more robust. Since I have been working with South Africa National Parks (SANParks) we have started setting up new populations of black rhinos, donating animals every year or so to new properties. Because it only takes a big disaster to cripple a single population, we are trying to expand their range. We cannot keep all our eggs in one basket with just one reserve. The challenge there is increasing land availability for rhinos to spread them out a bit more.

We have created two big populations of 20 animals each in the last couple of years. The animals are donated, so the owners don’t need to pay for them, they just need to look after them. Every year new calves are being born and that’s exactly what we want. However, the opposite is happening in some places where it becomes too expensive and risky to have rhinos. In fact, a lot of people are trying to get rid of their populations. They need dedicated anti-poaching teams and not every owner can afford that. So in some instances we are losing conservation land. It’s a knock-on effect from poaching.

Because I don’t come from a background of conservation, everyone is always asking me how I got into it. I used to go walking in Cape Town and Table Mountain, so I always knew I wanted to do something outside. I studied nature conservation for three years, which included two years of theory and a whole year of practical. For that, I chose to go as far away from Cape Town as possible and that’s how I ended up in Addo National Park and working for SANParks. I did not see my first rhino until I was 19.

I discovered my passion for rhinos at Addo. Working there, I was just doing general conservation, but luckily it was a time of year when they were moving a lot of rhinos. When we were keeping them in holding pens, nobody really knew what to feed them so I had to do a little research project into their behaviours. When we started doing crate training with them – getting them used to getting in and out of the moving crates – I just fell in love with them.

(Image: Tusk Conservation Awards)

Sometimes it can be difficult to find funding – people get tired of it. Since the dramatic increase in poaching in 2008, we have been fighting for eight hard years and yet you still hear of more rhinos being poached. People wonder, ‘What are you doing? Why is it that the poaching hasn’t gone away yet?’ Without the support from donors and NGOs, we wouldn’t be where we are. However, understandably, they expect to see results even if the poaching is still difficult to fight.

Every now and again you have to show the gruesome side of poaching so we are not censoring how horrific it can be. The brutality and the suffering that some of these animals go through, the ones that live with half their faces cut off for a couple of hours, or the ones that have their tendons or spines cut to stop them running away because the poachers don’t want to use another bullet. Or the orphaned calves that will stay with their dead mothers and still try to suckle them for a few days. This is what happens daily and we can’t afford to shelter people too much from that.

The nature of the job can change you as a person. When I first started there were no cameras and gates but now you have to have cameras on all of your gates and watch people who are coming in and out. It changes your character in some ways because it makes you suspicious of everybody coming in. All of us who are in this studied conservation, none of us were born to be armed security guards. We have had to change our mindset and get used to the idea that protection is the number one priority.

I think you have to be realistic in what you can do. Optimism can be difficult but we have to remember that if we hadn’t been doing what we do, the figures – which are horrific – would be a lot worse. We can only motivate ourselves knowing that we are preventing further poaching from happening.

Bill Bailey is a comedian, musician, actor and presenter. His latest project is the book, Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to British Birds, available now from Quercus Books

When I was a child, we would go on family outings to see birds, so it’s something which has been with me my whole life. Some of my fondest memories of childhood were family outings to bird sanctuaries, wetland centres, and the local reservoir, where there were a lot of water birds. Standing there, seeing if we could spot a great crested-grebe, to me that seems synonymous with childhood.

We have an amazingly diverse array of species for these small isles. A lot of the more spectacular birds, like white-tailed eagles, or golden eagles, are limited to certain parts of Britain, therefore they do require a bit of effort to try and see. But purely because you can enjoy them on a day-to-day basis, I really appreciate the more common or garden birds. The wren is amazingly widespread throughout Britain, it’s a very hardy little bird. A goldcrest is a beautiful little gem, but how many people can say they’ve seen them, unless they’re birders? It’s not the sort of bird you would see in your back garden unless you’re lucky. It’s the kind of thing that you’d have to make an effort to see. But there are millions of them!

In my shows I ask people if there’s any birders in and there’s always a healthy number. Maybe that’s because my audience crosses over with that demographic, but I don’t think so. The British generally have an enormous affection for wildlife – just look at the popularity of wildlife programmes. Bird fairs have more people every year.

One of the reasons for writing the book was that I wanted there to be the opportunity for anyone who’s not even remotely interested in birds, but who can look out of their office window or their home and see a bird, to see it in this book. There will be facts about it, a story about it, my encounters with it, a sketch, something to bring it to life. It’s a fascinating world and you can only access it when you start to observe, are able to acknowledge and name the birds. It’s not hard, it just takes a little bit of effort, and once you start being able to identify birds, it’s amazingly compulsive! You can see why people get into it.

“Somehow the aesthetic beauty, the joy of seeing birds, is diminished by the idea of just collecting them as another species on the list”

The title ‘twitcher’ actually puts people off, because it’s reducing birds down to just ticking them off a list. I can understand people who are collectors, it’s like anything you’re collecting, you get a little bit obsessed by it. But somehow the aesthetic beauty, the joy of seeing them, is diminished by the idea of just collecting them as another species on the list. I include in the book birds which ‘twitchers’ will just dismiss; they’re not interested in the common or garden bird. They’re interested in the exotics, the rarities, the strange migrants that blow in through some combination of being lost or [caught up in] a storm. To me, that’s not really what my relationship with birds is; it’s on a day-to-day level. It’s a daily enjoyment, whether it’s hearing goldfinches sing in the garden, or watching robins, occasionally a jay, or green finches. That has a kind of restorative quality which I love.

We’ve created our own little sanctuary at home. They’re all rescue cases, they’re all birds that are either handed to us or were taken on from sanctuaries. We take in injured birds, or those whose owners have died or where sanctuaries or private collections have been broken up and the birds can’t be housed in zoos. A lot of zoos have a really rigorous admissions policy, they need to know the bird’s genetic line before they can introduce them. So these birds are either destroyed or they get put in pet shops. It’s totally unsuitable. So we take them on. It’s not just birds, we take on all sorts of things, ducks, chickens, a snake, rabbits – I’ve lost count! There’s a lot of species, fur, feathers, scales, all manner of stuff.

There are a few projects which I’ve been really proud of, and projects that have really had a resonance with an audience. The documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace was very much about my own interest in travelling in Indonesia and following in his footsteps. But it became a piece about the natural world, about natural history, combined with the history of exploration in the 19th century and how that continues on today. It was partly because I’ve travelled to a lot of the places that he travelled to in Indonesia, and I discovered that years ago there was an area there called Wallacea, named after Wallace, and it’s huge! How come there’s this vast swathe of Indonesia named after this bloke, this guy who was an amateur explorer and naturalist? I became fascinated with his story, read The Malay Archipelago again, and thought there must be a documentary about him, and there wasn’t. That’s really what prompted it.

CV

1965 Born in Somerset

1996 Nominated for an Edinburgh Perrier Comedy Award for the solo show Bill Bailey’s Cosmic Jam

2006 Hosted Wild Thing I Love You on Channel 4, a documentary about protecting Britain’s wildlife

2010 Hosted Bill Bailey’s Birdwatching Bonanza on Sky 1; Had a species of pitcher plant named after him, the Nepenthes Bill Bailey, in recognition of his conservation work

2011 Hosted Baboons With Bill Bailey on ITV, following the lives of urban South African baboons

Chris McIvor OBE is the head of Save the Children in Sri Lanka and has worked for aid agencies for more than 30 years. His latest book, The World is Elsewhere, is available now from Sandstone Press

Midway through studying philosophy and English at Trinity College in Dublin, I felt I needed a year out. I saw a job for a teacher in Northern Sudan, applied and stayed for four years, having abandoned my plans to return to study after just a few months. I stayed for two years in a place called Dongola, another year on the border with Chad, and another year teaching in southern Algeria. It was during that period of time that I had mixed experiences of aid work.

My first experience was visiting a project quite close to where I was teaching. My fellow Sudanese teachers invited me to their village and there was an irrigation project nearby that had completely flopped. I can always remember the people in the village saying that they’d never been consulted, that if they’d been asked they would never have sited the irrigation scheme in that area because the equipment was of the wrong kind and so on. It was a rather negative first experience of aid work.

What strongly came across with that and subsequent interactions was that as it wasn’t their project, local people felt no stake in maintaining it. The projects that seemed to have a reasonable chance of being sustainable on their own terms were ones where locals across the board had been systematically involved, while the ones that seemed to collapse were those where there was a very heavy external influence, with very little interaction with local people.

I was country director in Zimbabwe for Save the Children for seven years. We had a community project digging boreholes in communities in the Binga district in western Zimbabwe. It’s the driest area. We thought we had it right because we’d consulted the community as to where they wanted the boreholes sited and had trained them to repair minor damage. I visited a year or so later and had a discussion with a group of schoolkids, asking if they were happy. They all complained that the holes were miles away from the school, the clinic and their houses. I said that we had consulted the communities but the kids replied that we’d only spoke to the older gentlemen in the community whose principle priority was getting a good enough supply of water to have a ready supply of beer. We had never spoken to the children or the mothers.

From that we learnt that in the process of consultation, it’s not just about asking anybody in the community, you have to be selective about who you speak to and how you speak to them so you get a wide range of opinions.

“Engagement with the public is not just about commercial transactions and putting money in boxes, it’s also about engaging with people in the countries where we come from about the rights of children”

I had challenges in my own team in Zimbabwe. For example, my old staff would say ‘why are we bothering to consult kids? We’ve got it right’. That experience with the boreholes did more to change views than any kind of philosophical argument because people saw that it resulted in a flawed project.

We’ve had pushback at times from government officers saying ‘why are you bothering consulting kids? They’re under the age of 18, they’re meant to be seen and not heard’. But diplomatically and constructively, and through examples like the boreholes, you can go back to governments and say ‘we collectively constructed the boreholes in the wrong area because we omitted to consult kids’.

I think sometimes there’s a misconception when it comes to aid that dealing with a national government is dealing with a single, homogenous entity. It isn’t. Same with governments at home. Through experience, we know in Egypt not just the ministries that we can work with, but the people within them that we get a good deal from, and that we can have a constructive relationship with. These are your allies.

Sometimes you run into… conflicts, if that’s the right word, or ministries that may have different priorities, and that becomes a dialogue. Their priorities have to be things that we genuinely believe are in the best interests of children. We won’t put funding into projects that we don’t think are going to deliver tangible benefits for children.

What lies at the core of our belief is that children have rights. In every circumstance where we encounter children, there are rights infringements that need to be promoted. So engagement with the public is not just about commercial transactions and putting money in boxes, it’s also about engaging with people in the countries where we come from about the rights of children. We hope that, in turn, gets translated into their own circumstances in their own families and communities.

CV

1980 Moves to Sudan to become a teacher

1991 Joins Save the Children

2005 Awarded OBE for services for Save the Children in Zimbabwe

2008 Publishes A Bend in the Nile

2012 Becomes Head of Save the Children Egypt

2012 Publishes In the Old Chief’s Country

2016 Becomes Head of Save the Children Sri Lanka

2016 Publishes The World is Elsewhere

This was published in the November 2016 edition of Geographical magazine.

Chaz Powell is an adventurer and expedition leader who is aiming to be the first person to walk the complete 1,600 miles of the Zambezi River

A long time ago I decided I just wanted to get away and travel. I didn’t know what to do, so I ended up going on a round-the-world trip, and never really stopped. It was aimless in a way; I enjoyed it, that freedom of travelling and not having a care. I went through Southeast Asia, did working holidays in New Zealand and Australia, then an overland trip of Africa. I fell in love with Africa and stayed there for quite a while. Zambia is my second home, and I just got a bit obsessed with the Zambezi.

I came back to the UK because I wanted to become an expedition leader, so I trained and lived in the mountains for a couple of years. After that I had a couple of years working in bushcraft, which is something I never really thought about doing. Now I’m leaning more towards leading and planning remote expeditions.

I always had that passion for starting a career in the outdoors, I did Duke of Edinburgh award at school, but it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I started to really want to explore. I was interested in long-distance walks; I’ve done that quite a lot in the UK; the West Highland Way, Offa’s Dyke, and the River Severn. I can be a bit of a loner at times. Sometimes I’ll be in a crowd of people and feel I have to get away and just be on my own and do something outdoors.

I’m constantly just trying to think of different and interesting ways to travel. I’ve done a few trips this year already, such as trying to use a £100 budget to get to the northern most point of Europe to film the Northern Lights. In February I decided to walk the length of the steepest island in the world, La Palma in the Canaries.

A lot of people get it, the travel bug, once you start doing something and you try to go back to a normal life and it doesn’t really work. I’ve had to adapt my life to fit with this craving I get for travel. I’ve found that unique mix of having a bit of life at home, but then I can go off and do something for a while, leading expeditions and things, and come back and I’ve fed that craving.

Being the first person to complete the length of the Zambezi River was never something I originally thought of, it’s not the driving force. I’ve met with David Lemon, who did walk the river, but he couldn’t complete certain sections. I still feel like I’m in debt to him, and, in so many ways, he’s the first person who’s done it, but obviously not all of it.

“It’s hard not to think about the finishing point. I’m picturing that beach and the ocean and how good it’ll feel”

There are certain areas I’m going to pass through that are hopefully going to blow me away. There’s a waterfall just before the Victoria Falls called the Ngonye Falls, which no one really knows about. I’m going to take each section as it comes, each week we’ll sit down and say ‘We need to get from this point to this point, what obstacles are in the way? If it’s flooded, is there a nearby road we can take?’ Each section is going to have to be addressed as we get to it. There’s no set path, I’ll be relying on GPS to find me the best route. If I can’t walk next to the river, which is tricky in parts, I’m going to be passing through nearby villages instead.

I’m looking forward to those cultural encounters. I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa but it’s normally been in cities and towns that are used to people and tourists. But areas where they’re living a simple life next to the river, that’s going to be interesting to see their reaction. I’ll be looking to get involved with interactions with people as much as possible, seeing how they live and documenting their lifestyle along the river.

I’ll be trying to trade with fishermen for food. There’s no support system in place, it’s a case of carrying dry goods like pasta, rice, and oats. We’ll be picking fruits, vegetables and meats up along the river, and drinking water from there too.

I always wanted to raise money for a wildlife sanctuary but I was always a bit sceptical about raising money for big charities. They do amazing work, but I felt I could go for a smaller company. I see so much in the media now about the loss of elephants and rhinos, I just wanted to find a decent charity that was doing something about it, and work for them to raise money and awareness. I did a bit of research and the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation seemed like the best option.

It’s hard not to think about the finishing point. I’m picturing that beach and the ocean and how good it’ll feel. I’ve finished long-distance walks that are nowhere near as long, but it’s always felt quite emotional to be at the end of one. Sad and happy at the same time.

CV

1979 Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire

2004 Left the UK for a decade of travelling

2012 Worked at Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai in Thailand

2015 Became an official mountain leader; walked the length of the River Severn

The exhibition is all about perceptions of beauty. I couldn’t be the sole arbiter of what was considered beautiful in the world, so I asked a whole group of people that I call ‘luminaries’ – all world experts in their field – ‘Where’s the most beautiful wild place you’ve ever seen?’

Sir David Attenborough said the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen was when he put on fins and dived underwater onto a coral reef, so I had to figure out a way of painting that. I sat on the bottom with extra weight belts, and did drawings of the fish and coral on plastic drafting film.

With everybody else nominating all these places, which I was duty bound to go to, I thought I should nominate somewhere myself. So, I thought as a contrast, I would go to places I can walk to out of my own back door. Cornwall is one of the most beautiful places in the world to me, it’s just that living there you tend not to think so. There’s no real reason to have to go 8,000 miles to do a painting, there are plenty of great paintings on your own backdoor.

I’m a painter who started exploring. If I stopped exploring I’d continue to paint but if I stopped painting I wouldn’t explore. I used to be a pop artist, but in the end I got fed up with second-hand imagery. It was too far removed from what I wanted to say. So I thought, ‘What do I care about? I care about the environment; I’ve always been an environmentalist. I enjoy hiking and living outdoors. I like adventures. Perhaps I ought to do work about that?’ So I started to develop this way of working and realised that the process was almost as interesting as the work itself.

All my work is about what it’s actually like to be there, it’s not simply about putting a frame around a piece of landscape and copying it. What I want people to experience is this sense of absorbing yourself in a place; not just what the place looks like, but what it feels like, what the weather’s like, what animals you encounter and what happens to you during a period of time.

All my exhibitions have a definite theme and a definite start and finish. The new Foster Art & Wilderness Foundation was set up in order to keep them together rather than having them distributed through lots of collectors.

“What’s so lovely about being a painter is that everybody is interested in what you’re doing”

I don’t take photographs. I find that, first of all, the colour just isn’t subtle enough. Secondly, my paintings are about time spent, whereas a photograph is a sixtieth of a second and that’s it. Also, if you look at a photograph you find that the colour of the shadow is just a dead black. Whereas if you look at the colour of an actual shadow in real life there are all sorts of shades in there which the camera doesn’t get. So I’ve never, ever used photographs.

The place I’ve painted more than anywhere else is the Grand Canyon (see below). Certainly there are some places I’ve done that I don’t feel the need to go back to, such as Greenland for example. Some places are obviously much easier to work in than others. Rainforests are very, very difficult because you’re being bitten all the time, you’re sweating, you’re covered in mud and leeches, you’re wet. It is dismal. The Canyon I find a very comfortable place to work, although of course it can be scorchingly hot.

I cut my kit down to the absolute minimum. My paintbox is the size of about ten cigarettes, and I never use any other paintbox. Every single brushstroke in this exhibition has been done from that box. I have a folding drawing board that I’ve invented, made out of marine ply, but much lighter. That goes onto my backpack, which I then fold out and lash down to the landscape, bang in tent pegs and guy lines, peg my paper onto it and just sit and work. The process is simple, but it does take a lot of concentration.

Of course you can’t paint every leaf, although sometimes you feel you’ve got to. You have to distil it as best you can until you get that overwhelming sense of just being right inside all this stuff, but without having to depict every leaf, which literally would drive you insane.

What’s so lovely about being a painter is that everybody is interested in what you’re doing. You turn up in somebody’s little community, get your drawing board out, stretch out your paper, and everybody wants to know what on Earth you’re doing. You’re no threat to anybody, you’re not there to steal anything, you’re not there to exploit them – in fact exactly the opposite. Quite often in Nepal and places like that you become a huge part of their income.

Leng Ouch is an investigative reporter and activist. He spent many months undercover to expose the illegal logging taking place in Cambodia’s forests and is a recipient of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize

My work involves undercover investigating. I have disguised myself as a cook, a driver, a timber dealer and a tourist in order to collect evidence of the illegal logging happening in Cambodia, where we have some of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Criticising the government and timber magnates is very risky. My former colleague, Chut Wutty, was murdered by unknown assailants in 2012 while showing journalists an illegal logging camp in the southwest. Rangers in National Parks are often targets and have been shot for confronting illegal loggers. My family often have to move around if we fear for our safety.

I was born in Takéo province, where my parents were farmers. At the height of the Khmer Rouge, my family had to move from place to place to survive. When we moved to Phnom Penh, I cleaned classrooms in exchange for lessons. I won a scholarship to study law, which is when I began to notice the illegality occurring in Cambodia’s forests.

Since 2000, the government has been leasing large portions of the forest to private companies through Economic Land Concessions (ELCs). On paper these encourage large-scale agricultural plantations of cassava, sugar and rubber. However, in reality, ELCs are used as a disguise for illegal logging of coveted tree species, such as rosewood. Sawmills are set up within the ELC area and are used to launder illegal timber from the surrounding area. The illegal timber is then sold to markets in Vietnam and China for furniture. We are in a situation where legitimate development permits are being used to illegally clear land.

We want the Prime Minister Hun Sen, the National Assembly and the Ministry of the Environment to close all the sawmills in our protected forests. The sawmills are the epicentre of the logging and cause a wide ring of devastation.

Initially, the ELCs were supposed to develop livelihoods for the people – they were meant to establish schools, hospitals and boost the economy. In reality, they are destroying communities. Companies force villagers off the leased area, they erect fences, block waterways and reduce local economies. High-ranking officials and tycoons own the sawmills and private companies, meanwhile villagers have to buy bottled water and earn a pittance as employees. That being said, most people refuse to work for private companies as they treat local people like the enemy.

“We have to put ourselves at risk to write about Cambodia’s reality. It is the only way to protect the forests we have left”

Environmentally, it is devastating. The trees are removed with the roots so they can never grow back. Companies are also producing chemical effluents that flow through the watershed, contaminating the surrounding area.

When we find illegal logging operations, we confiscate their equipment: wood, chainsaws and even bulldozers. Our direct approach means that many NGOs are wary of working with us, they don’t want to appear too critical of the government and its affiliated trades. For that reason we are unfunded.

Since being exposed, the government has cancelled 23 land concessions covering 220,000 acres of forest, two of which had been protected by Virachey National Park. Other legal protections have also been put in place. However, the problem is not the red tape and legislation. It’s implementation of the law on the ground, in the trees themselves. The Ministry of the Environment never actually goes into the forest to patrol the protected areas. There are hundreds of trees falling with no one from the government around to hear them.

There is a limit to what I can do undercover now that my face can be recognised. I am thankful to win the Goldman Environmental Prize, it has raised my profile – so I will need to change the way I am working as well as the strategies of my NGO, the Cambodian Human Rights Task Force.

In the future, I hope it will be able to involve more young people, without the next generation it will be difficult to keep protecting the forests and nearby livelihoods. I would like to be a good role model and show young people how they can become law-literate for human and environmental rights.

The jungle is dangerous. The companies can be threatening and the environment just as hazardous with malaria, wildlife and temperamental weather. However, we have to put ourselves at risk to write about Cambodia’s reality. It is the only way to protect the forests we have left.

Martine Croxall is a journalist, broadcaster and one of the main presenters for BBC News. She also hosts the channel’s The Papers programme and presents the RGS-IBG’s Discovering People evenings

I had a really inspiring geography teacher – several of them in fact – in a strong geography department at the school I went to. Hugely enthusiastic people who imparted that enthusiasm in their teaching. Enjoyable subjects tend to be easier to work hard at.

Leeds was one of the top departments in the country for geography at the time. It turned out to be an extremely friendly department as well, a nice bunch of people and really nice lecturers who were very active with their own research and attracted a lot of money to the university for the work they were doing.

When I was at university, people misunderstood geography. They would say, ‘If you’re doing geography, what are you going to do after? Teach it?’ They didn’t seem to realise that the skills you acquire in the degree are well respected by employers. Something like 20 per cent of geographers ended up going into accountancy and management consultancy at the time. People don’t seem to realise how versatile it is.

I’d had a bit of a yearning to go to Africa. Cradle of humanity and all that. I wanted to see some of the geography I’d been learning about, to be able to travel through the different latitudes, across the Equator and back out the other side.

I travelled 14,500 miles from Nottingham to Nairobi. A guy from Nottingham was trying to take a Bedford MK 10-ton truck to east Africa so he could run safaris along the coast of Tanzania and Malawi. It was a tiny advert in a local newspaper that just said ‘Adventurous people wanted. Phone Dave’.

I set off with a group of around 20 people – fewer than that by the time we got Nairobi due to ill health, malaria or just having enough as it was pretty rough. It made you very resourceful. I spoke more French than anyone else so I ended up going to a lot of the embassies and doing the negotiations for crossing the borders which was great experience.

We got up into some really remote places. We saw the mountain gorillas in the Rwenzori mountain range. We saw the Virunga National Park. We stayed with a group of pygmies in Mount Hoyo called the Twa. We’d park up and spend the night on the edge of villages in the middle of Ghana. I remember one morning waking up to all these whispering voices. I looked round and there were children surrounding us watching us sleep. The moment we moved they scattered.

“It’s only when friends point out to me that I seem to see the world through a geographer’s eyes that I realise how much that’s the case”

I so wanted to enjoy broadcasting that I was terrified of actually making a start. If I didn’t like it, what would I do then? I remember walking into the newsroom at BBC Radio Leicester and thinking it was bedlam. Phones were going off everywhere, people were flying around editing stories and so on. It was very exciting. I didn’t know how anybody knew what they were meant to be doing, but I felt very excited by that environment.

The BBC has many faults as we all know, and goodness knows we’ve been beset by scandals lately which we all acknowledge could have been handled better. But I still think by and large we are the benchmark by which other people judge themselves.

The BBC’s role is to be impartial and trusted. Our job is to curate the news but not tell people what to think. To present the facts as best we can. To hold people to account – particularly those in elected office or public officials. And it’s to explain very complex stories in ways that are relevant to people. Thankfully we don’t have to be patriarchal and patrician about it anymore – it’s not ‘We’re the BBC and we know best’. What’s nice is that we’ve been able to change the conversation we have with the audience.

In my job, I hadn’t realised initially quite how often I use geography. It’s only when friends point out to me that I seem to see the world through a geographer’s eyes that I realise how much that’s the case. Always wanting to know how much of a story is about a place – the geography of a place. Obviously a lot of international stories these days are to do with strategic problems and conflict, which is all about the geography.

The best newsrooms are stronger for having lots of disciplines in them. At the BBC we have every subject under the sun that people will have done at degree level. You need to be able to report a breadth of stories, so if you’ve got physicists, chemists, historians, engineers, geographers and English students then you’ve got a really good spread of subjects that will be covered.

CV

1969 Born in Leicestershire

1990 Graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in Geography

John Peck is an adventurer, expedition leader and organiser. He runs Executive Stretch, for business leaders looking to make adventure part of their lives, and Bravehearts, wilderness survival programmes on remote Scottish islands for inner-city youth leaders working with violent gangs

Most of my adventures have been very eclectic. I get a fascination for something I hear about, like someone rowing across the Atlantic, and think ‘God, it would be interesting to do that!’

I’m not a particular expert in any aspect of adventure, but I tend to go for things I’ve never done before. When I was a young army officer I climbed Popocatépetl, a volcano in Mexico, never having climbed anything like that before. I then went on to climb in the Alps and ultimately ended up taking an expedition to the Garhwal Himalayas.

A lot of this stuff has taken place during the latter part of my life. I’m 70 now and quite a bit happened around the age of 60 such as rowing across the Atlantic or running the Marathon des Sables. I think in a sense it’s from a kind of panic: ‘Oh my god I’m getting old, I’d better do this stuff while I still can.’

Most of the stories in Restless are not very glorious. Hopefully people will find them amusing because most of it is about the cock-ups I’ve made. Early on, one of my supervisors in the army said in my annual report: ‘This man works well in crises, but the trouble is he creates most of them himself.’

When I was a policeman, I took a yacht across the Channel with a few other officers. On the way back we got hit by a Force 10 gale. The waves were thirty feet high, the lights had all been smashed, guys were getting their heads bashed on the mainsail, blood was everywhere, the skipper had lost his marbles and was going into severe shock. I just thought it was really quite exhilarating. Eventually the lifeboat came alongside, shouting at us to abandon the boat. The skipper told me to take the helm, told me to keep it in a straight line and then, when the lifeboat came roaring up alongside on the same wave and bashed into the side of us, he jumped over to it and left me to it.

When I was preparing to row the Atlantic, a friend asked me if I was going on my own and I said no, I’d feel better with someone else. He said that the most dangerous thing in the Atlantic is not the waves or the sharks or things like that. It’s the bloke who’s with you. At some stage you’ll want to kill him and he’ll want to kill you and the only thing that will stop you is thought of being found out!

“Early on, one of my supervisors in the army said in my annual report: ‘This man works well in crises, but the trouble is he creates most of them himself’”

I tend to hear about something then wonder if it’s possible to go there and because I’m a fairly extroverted personality I tend to involve other people. I run a company that works with quite senior business people who want to get away for a quick adventure but haven’t got time to plan it themselves. So we get a little posse of people together who want to do something then work out how we’re going to do it. I coach them to make sure they’re organised, fit enough and that their mental coping strategies are going to be strong enough to see them through the bad times.

We spent quite a bit of time on the Brandberg mountain (Namibia’s highest peak) which is very desolate. If you’re lucky you’ll find some water holes but you can’t be sure that any will be there. So you tend to have to carry huge loads – we were carrying 20 litres of water on some of these expeditions, 30-35kg up a mountain where a lot of it is a scramble. The medic with me there was a very strong guy but he got an infection, became dehydrated and had to give himself a drip which was quite something. Then later on somebody else went down so we gave him a drip. So recently I’ve been trained to put a catheter into someone’s arm and get some fluid into them. At the end of the day I’m accountable for bringing the people with me back alive.

For the past few years, we’ve been involved in taking gang leaders and youth workers away to remote Scottish islands. Part of me is thinking ‘how do we deal with this, what happens if these guys start to panic?’ They’re on an island, there’s no escape, they can’t go anywhere. What happens if we don’t get it right? But it gives you a lot of courage to do things, to take a lot of chances.

The gang leaders usually struggle on the morning of day two. They wake up and find they didn’t put their tarpaulins up properly or hadn’t cooked their meal and they’re hungry and they can get very fed up with it all. But that’s a pivotal moment for them. We ask how are we going to make this happen? Let’s go back and think through what happened and get the tarpaulins up again so they don’t blow away and how are we going to find food. And they grow and develop and come out the other end and you really see the best in them.

CV

1945 Born in London

1965 Joined the army, posted to British Honduras (now Belize)

1966 Climbed Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico

1969 Joined Metropolitan Police

1975 Was rescued from English Channel by RNLI

1984 Climbed the Matterhorn

1985 Ran police station in Stoke Newington during the riots

1986 Led a British/Indian police team up unclimbed peaks in Garhwal Himalayas

2004 Became the oldest British person to row across the Atlantic Ocean

Edward Whitley is a conservationist, author, and founder of the Whitley Fund for Nature

Over the generations, my family have always been involved in conservation. My great-great-uncle set up Paignton Zoo, starting with domestic animals, but importing increasingly exotic ones. Then my grandfather set up a charitable trust called the Whitley Animal Protection Trust in the 1960s – that was always a part of our lives as we grew up. So the concept has been in the family for generations.

Conservation has become more pressing over the last 30 years. When I set up the Whitley Fund for Nature – the charity behind the Whitley Awards – in 1993, it was off the back of us wanting to find and fund the best placed people who are working in developing countries where funds are most needed.

What the WFN tries to do is focus on conservation success stories and the progress that’s being made. The awards ceremony is about recognising and celebrating that – winning those small battles. In addition to the financial benefit of winning an award, our winners receive professional communications training to turn scientists into ambassadors so they’re able to communicate what they’re doing to the public and to policy makers.

We’ve now funded 170 conservationists in 70 different countries. Our first award winner was in 1994, and the prize value at that time was £15,000. Over the years it has increased as more supporters have joined us; at the moment they’re at £35,000, and we have seven or eight new Whitley award winners every year. We’re not the only funder, but we’re quite a significant one, and we help them get more funding. They raise a considerable amount of money once they’ve won our award, because we then put them in contact with other funders and nominate them for other prizes to help them fund raise. So the award acts as a stamp of approval and our funds are leveraged many times over.

“The good news is there are some fantastic and truly heroic people who are making a difference in places. Each victory is one to be really cherished”

Winning a Whitley Award is partly about the financial gain, but a lot of it is to do with the increased profile experienced as a result, especially back in a winner’s home country. If you give a grant it’s obviously great, but we thought it would have more impact if you make it into a high-profile award. Often a winner’s picture with our Patron, HRH The Princess Royal, will appear on the cover of their local newspaper. It gives them more influence when they’re trying to make policy recommendations, and it helps build pride in the local communities; they realise that people overseas care about what they’re doing.

All our previous winners are eligible for further funding, so they’re not in the spotlight just once and then never again. Once we’ve found them, we stick with them and invest in them. Very excitingly, we’ve just set up a new funding programme called the Whitley-Segré Conservation Fund to support past winners. Every pound we are able to raise for this programme will be matched by our Swiss partner, Fondation Segré, giving supporters the chance to double their donation for the first time.

We only ever fund local people in their own countries, we don’t believe in parachuting people in for a short period of time. You need somebody with local knowledge of the context in which they’re working so that what they do is effective. Somebody who is seen as part of that community, somebody who’s integrated, that’s how we’ve seen successful results in conservation.

Conservation doesn’t happen overnight. It is a long-term process, and sometimes the results aren’t as quick as you’d like them to be. Our donors realise this and are also in it for the long haul, which we are so grateful to them for. They all feel very connected, because they’re able to meet the people that they’re funding.

It was while writing Gerald Durrell’s Army that I met Claudio Padua, in Brazil. I was looking at who was doing good and effective conservation work, people who had been trained by Gerald Durrell, and Claudio was one of those people. When I first went out there it was really just him, working on the black lion tamarin project. He won a Whitley Award in 1999 and now he’s built an NGO called IPÊ, which operates multiple projects across the country, working to conserve tamarins (which are now in a much better position), tapirs and giant armadillos to name a few. So it’s gone from being something really small, to something much bigger.

Conservation still needs all the help it can get. The good news is there are some fantastic and truly heroic people who are making a difference in places. Each victory is one to be really cherished.

CV

1961 Born in Shrewsbury

1983 Graduated from Oxford University with an honours degree in English

1988 Became a trustee of the Whitley Animal Protection Trust

1992 Wrote Gerald Durrell’s Army

1994 Launched the first Whitley Awards ceremony

2013 Awarded an OBE for services to wildlife conservation

The 2016 Whitley Awards will be held on 27 April at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). For more information, visit whitleyaward.org

This was published in the April 2016 edition of Geographical magazine.

]]>I’m a GeographerMon, 18 Apr 2016 11:12:58 +0100Mark Evans: explorer, author and founder of the University of the Deserthttp://geographical.co.uk/people/i-m-a-geographer/item/1572-mark-evans
http://geographical.co.uk/people/i-m-a-geographer/item/1572-mark-evans

Mark Evans is an explorer, author and founder of the University of the Desert in Oman. His latest 1,300km expedition across the word’s largest sand desert, the Rub al’Khali, recreated the first crossing by Bertram Thomas in 1930

My journey to Oman actually began when I started my teaching career at a tough, bottom-of-league comprehensive in Somerset. I admired how the head of geography held the kids’ attention: it was because he was the one that took them out for field trips on the weekend. Eventually I became the head of geography myself at a school in Nairobi. The Arabic influence on the city is what really sparked my interest in the desert region. It led me to teaching in Bahrain and eventually Oman.

I guess I wanted to teach for all the wrong reasons – it was a lifestyle that enabled me to continue on expeditions. Between jobs I could go north to Greenland, Svalbard or the Northwest Passage, and while teaching in Bahrain I could do expeditions in the desert and use the weekends to take the students on field trips. If I were king for a day I would scrap all of the other subjects and teach the entire curriculum through geography.

Polar and desert expeditions complimented each other because there are such similarities. The geographical definition of a desert is somewhere with less than 250mm of rain a year. This applies to Bahrain and Greenland, they are both deserts – one of ice and one of sand. You also find similarities in the people that live in these regions. Most live on the edge of human tolerance and because of that most share a warmth and a generosity that is overwhelming.

The truth is, you don’t conquer the desert. You do what the desert allows you to do. I’m always reminded of a skiing expedition I did across Greenland in the 1990s. We had a call on a satellite phone telling us ‘at this rate you’re going to break the fastest record for crossing the Greenland ice cap’. We looked at each other and thought, do we really want to do that? We worked so hard for two years to make this journey happen. Why rush and get it over in 17 days? I think, there is a lot to be said for slowness.

There is also a lot of focus on doing expeditions unsupported. I feel we should stop worrying about that so much and embrace the fact that behind every steering wheel is a person. As an explorer, you can choose to either ignore your support, living in the cocoon of being a Westerner on foreign land, or you can open up to the society around you.

“It’s always an upwards struggle to change Western perceptions of the Middle East”

While the desert is a magnificent place, this expedition was about people. In Wilfred Thesiger’s account of crossing the Empty Quarter in 1947, he doesn’t refer to the place as much as the people living in it. That is his great memory – the comradeship and the hospitality of the Bedouin and nomadic tribes he met. Our similar route crossed the borders of three different countries: Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, so it had to be as much about people as place. We tried to communicate values as much as physical discovery.

We used the expedition as a way to get young people involved with the desert. To do that we had to use social media. While in Saudi Arabia, a team of young Saudis joined us in the desert to ride and walk. Then as we approached Qatar, there was a team of young Qataris who met us on camels for the last leg to Doha.

I set up the University of the Desert as a means to teach young people about the Empty Quarter and about each other. When groups of young people come out with us it is often the first time that they have the opportunity to sit down and be quiet in the desert. After we have persuaded them to unplug themselves from the digital world, they can actually sit down and think about the next step in their lives or careers. Three times a year we take 18 young people from 18 European and Middle Eastern nations to the desert and get to the bottom of controversial topics.

It was TE Lawrence who described the fireplace as the ‘university of the desert’. It is around the fire where stories are told, news is exchanged and disputes settled. When you’ve got 18 young people from polarised cultures sitting around the same fire, with no doors to hide behind, the cooperation is phenomenal. It’s an opportunity to expose young people to the reality of the Middle East.

It’s always an upwards struggle to change Western perceptions of the Middle East. I was recently in Romania and someone asked me ‘aren’t you a little bit worried living in Oman with everything that’s going on in Syria?’ I had to say, ‘well Syria’s closer to Romania than it is to Oman, shouldn’t you be worried?’ While headlines are dominated by negativity, the society out there is wonderful. Huge tracts of that region are incredibly peaceful.

Louie Psihoyos is a photographer and an Academy Award-winning film director for the documentary The Cove, whose latest film is Racing Extinction

The Cove is about one little geographic body of water, a couple of hectares. But with that little body of water we were able to talk about big issues. Here we’re talking about a huge issue. That’s the question, how do you take such a broad issue and make it so that people feel that they can grasp it, and then at the end actually do something about it? It’s a mass extinction, with multiple drivers, not just one cause. So we wanted to approach it from that perspective. How do you give people the breadth of it, but at the end feel like they can have an impact?

We started by trying to bring it down to a single species, and a single animal in a species. The first animal you hear about is the ‘O’o bird, the last male of a species singing for a female who will never come. The idea is just to get people to realise what it’s like to empathise with one creature. You talk about 30,000 species being lost every year – it’s just a number. Until you put a feeling on it, you don’t have a sense of that loss.

There’s a hidden world of voices. Just about everything with a heartbeat is singing, you just can’t hear it. The blue whale has the loudest song in the animal kingdom but you can’t hear it, it’s below the threshold for our hearing. But they’re actually able to communicate, they’ve adapted so that in the southern part of the ocean where there are no geographic obstacles, they can actually communicate over 13,000 miles. They’ve adapted to communicate in a silent ocean around the world with other creatures. That should give everybody pause for thought.

We’re all hypocrites though. I try to think very consciously of the actions that I’m taking and how it’s going to affect the future. I flew around to promote this movie on a plane that spewed more carbon dioxide than anyone should produce in a year – hopefully the impact of the film is offsetting the impact of the damage I’m doing. Another thing we also do is set aside a number of acres in the Ecuadorian rainforest so we can basically indulge ourselves by making a film.

We had 2,000 hours of footage, and we narrowed it down to an hour and a half. In a traditional Hollywood film, they shoot about 57 hours. We have to overshoot our mark because you’re not sure when you’re making a film where the story is – a lot of it is found in the editing room.

The way the film is structured, it covers the smallest thing in the ocean – plankton. You think, what does plankton have to do with me? It’s only the base of the food chain, responsible for two out every three breaths that you take, and we’re losing them because of acidification. Hopefully people get a sense that we’re not just on the top of the pyramid looking down at the rest of life below us anymore. It’s a web, we’re all connected. You might not think about plankton, but it’s more important to your life than an African elephant is.

I’ve dropped in on sites that are supposed to be the best preserved reefs in the world and literally been down there and seen nothing but rubble. There’s a reef in Papua New Guinea that was seen by a friend of mine, Jim Clark, the guy who started Netscape and financed The Cove. He wanted to show me this reef but it was gone, just rubble. Because of an El Niño year, combined with dynamite fishing, it was completely obliterated.

All the river dolphins are now in peril. We’re set to lose half of all frogs, we could lose half of all turtles in the next few decades too. The burning of fossil fuels is acidifying the oceans. We’re losing the coral reefs, we’re losing plankton, we’re losing these incredible species that came from the same gauntlet of history that we have. 4.6 billion years of evolution to get here. And one species, homo sapiens, which means ‘the wise ones’, is causing the Anthropocene, the age of man – the biggest extinction event perhaps since the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago.

The thing I want to leave everybody with is the sense that together we can reverse things. We saw it happen with The Cove, we were able to reduce the numbers, the killing of dolphins from 23,000 per year down to about 6,000, almost a 75 per cent drop. We have an opportunity to scale this up, by going to racingextinction.com and being part of this change, through the campaign #StartWith1Thing. You think, it’s just too big, it’s too much for one person to handle, but you see that the small changes we make will have an effect millions of years from now. This is the most important time for a human being to be alive if you want to create massive change. We’re one step away from either greatness, or the greatest disaster in the last 65 million years.

CV

1957 Born in Dubuque, Iowa

1980 Won the College Photographer of the Year award and became the first new National Geographic photographer in more than a decade

1994 Published Hunting Dinosaurs, a book about travelling the world in search of dinosaur remains

2005 Founded the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit that uses film, photography and media to raise awareness of environmental issues in the ocean

2010 Won the Best Documentary Academy Award for The Cove, a film about dolphin hunting in Japan

This article was published in the February 2016 edition of Geographical magazine.

Robert Penn is an author, journalist and TV presenter. He wrote and produced the BBC series Tales from the Wild Wood, and wrote It’s All About the Bike and his latest book The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

At the heart of my story is the idea that how we value things made from natural materials is a reflection of how we value nature itself. In our recent history, we have removed things made from natural materials from our homes, things you’d use day in, day out, and I think that has an effect. If we have no deep, daily association with our woods and timber, we won’t value and protect our trees.

Ash has been the most versatile and functional of the trees that grow in temperate climates around the world over the course of human history, and the respect that our ancestors would have had for ash was born out of how useful it was. If you look at how much we used it, and its versatility, and then you consider how our use has fallen off in the last 50 to 60 years, that’s a metaphor for our relationship with nature.

There is inevitably a dilemma between my affection for a tree while it’s living, and felling it in order to convert it into lots of different things, which will be useful to many different people in different ways. That is a dilemma which has been familiar to man for a very long time. But you’re not killing these trees, you’re just cutting them down. You’re resetting the clock. This is a fundamental aspect of woodland management in Britain. You cut them down; they grow again. You also cut a tree down to allow sunlight into the wood, which increases and improves the biodiversity and ecology of that woodland.

We have a contract with our woodlands. We have managed them for a very long time, and that means the ecology of the woodland is, in a sense, reliant on us. Generally speaking, research has shown that the biodiversity of our woodland declines if it is left alone.

We are at a strange position in Britain with respect to woodland management at the moment: there are an awful lot of people who think that our woodlands ought to be protected by doing nothing with them, and that’s wrong. If you go back just 50 years, you would find that everybody understood that trees coppice, and that’s how you extend their lives. An ash tree, for example, will live as a single stem or ‘maiden’ tree for no more than 200 years. If you coppice it, it might live to 400 or 500. There’s a lime tree at Westonbirt Arboretum that was growing when the Romans were here. It’s 2,000 years old and has been coppiced every 25 years. If it had never been coppiced, it would have died long ago.

We have lost a lot of knowledge about our trees and how to maintain our woodlands. At the talks I give, I ask people to put up their hands if they feel confident they can recognise an ash tree, and I generally get about 20 per cent who put their hand up. That is a radical change; if you went back 60 years you’d probably find 95 per cent of the population could recognise an ash tree.

One of the lovely things about writing this book was finding craftsmen whose intimacy and understanding of the timber, of this fantastic natural resource, is profound. So the knowledge hasn’t been lost altogether; it’s just in fewer hands than it was previously. That gives me cause to go out and bang the drum about this and say we need to widen the knowledge base again.

When I moved to the Black Mountains in south Wales 12 years ago, I wanted to associate myself with the landscape in a meaningful way. I wanted to understand the cultural inheritance the land provides, and I didn’t want to live like a refugee in my own country. I wanted a meaningful relationship with the landscape.

I feel the urge to go travelling deeply. It comes in waves, and sometimes it’s overwhelming. When I rode a bike around the world, I rode in a westerly direction. I promised myself at the end of the journey that, at the other end of my life, I’d do it again in an easterly direction. I’m a way off doing it – maybe 15 or 20 years – but at some point in my sixties I expect to get on my bike and head east. That’s something I’d very much like to do.

I run a community woodland group and lots of families come once a month for a very informal, mildly educational day. I try and impart a little bit of knowledge, but actually it’s mainly about mucking about in the woods, lighting a fire and toasting marshmallows. It’s only a small group, but it’s important. If lots of people were doing something similar then it may well be that the next generation will grow up to have an intimate relationship with our trees and woods again. I think that would be fantastic.

CV

1967 Born in Birmingham

1989 Graduates from the University of Bristol with a degree in history

1996-99 Cycles around the world

2007 Co-publishes The Wrong Kind of Snow

2010 Publishes It’s All About the Bike

2012 Presents BBC series Tales from the Wild Wood

2013 Cycles the Trans-Amazonian Highway with former cricketer Freddie Flintoff for Sky TV series Flintoff’s Road to Nowhere

2015 Publishes The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

This article was published in the January 2016 edition of Geographical magazine.